HeyMath! Consultant: Daniel
So far my experience of India has been very positive. The ex-Cambridge students are usually involved in the content side but I have a different role, I help administrate and redesign parts of the website, and dress up as Santa.
I'm sure the others have explained the role of tutors so I'll talk a little about how the site is managed. The site is jsp coded using JavaScript as its scripting language, we use an sql database for storage and retrieval of user information and details. Just as I was settling in (first week) the company got a surge of interest and we were rushed off our feet trying to deal with all the enquiries. New users brought browser support issues that hadn't been investigated before but our new staging environment makes thorough testing possible before deployment. As HeyMath! is primarily a website a strong element of design is involved, adding pages requested by teachers and maintaining the designs already present.
The majority of a day is taken investigating user queries. If a user has experienced a problem and it's down to some bug in the system it'll be up to you to chase it until it's resolved. So, the work can be uneven some days you'll be rushed off your feet and others you can deal with the backlog of suggested features. The job is mostly results based, if there's nothing urgent pressing then the weekends are your own as most of the tutors find.
I'm enjoying living in India. The food is very good and pretty cheap; it's nice to feel that you could eat out every night. There's a lot of Veg food and once you can spot a chili nothing is too hot, certainly compared to curry-houses in England.
There's not an incredible amount of nightlife but there are Cinemas showing English language films, pubs (of a kind), a station if you want to travel to south India at the weekends.
The culture is fairly conservative; alcohol is sold in fewer places and with little variety of beer. On the plus side there are cultural festivals through the year to go to and take part in AND a warm Christmas day!
When I got here I had long hair, it just wasn't manageable with the humidity. I've been told that I missed the proper heat so be warned. The rains came which made everything much cooler, which was nice.
