Alok Bhatia came to USA in December 1992 after graduating as a Chemical Engineer (1988-1992) from IIT-BHU (Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi). In the spring of 1993, Alok joined as a Masters candidate in the Industrial Engineering program at West Virginia University (WVU), Morgantown, WV, USA. Soon after, Alok realized that with a MS in Industrial Engineering, there will be problems in getting H1. So, in Fall 1993, Alok jumped to the Masters Program in Computer Science in WVU. He graduated in June 1996 (It took Alok 3 years to finish MS in Computer Science because of 11 pre-requisites that Alok had to do before moving on to Computer Science). In July 2006, Alok joined Synopsys Inc. in Mountain View, CA as a Programmer Analyst working on Perl/CGI and JavaScript packages. In 1998, Alok joined Ernst and Young (Big 5 consulting firm) as a Management Trainee. In 2000, Alok joined Excite.com (a onetime big portal, just like Yahoo is today) as a Software Engineer. In 2003, Alok joined Epinions.com, had a brief stint in Inktomi Corporation and Quovadx corporation and then jumped to Wells Fargo Bank as a Software Engineer. Finally, in 2004, Alok got his break as a Business Analyst and then as a Project Manager in Wells Fargo Bank. In 2006, Alok started his IT certifications business.