The story of 9th semester!(again a long post worth reading)
The ppl who have read the story of the last(8th) semester might suspect that was the greatest roller-coaster sandwiched between 4 months,but this one the 9th read "Demon from dungeons" is surely giving a stiff competition to previous semester(both in terms of excitement,twists and emotional spectrum).So it all started at a place far away from my motherland in a b'ful country,called ireland.My gf broke the news that she is going to get engaged and after mulling a lot about my present status of life,capability and responsiblities...i finally decided to let her go!
It seems that it was too easy for me but actually it was very tough...it might have been impossible if i happen to be in India at that time but the gegraphical difference and some new challenges in my life at that time realy helped me to reduce the intensity of blow....and i became single again but mind u not ready to mingle :) !
I decided that this is going to be the most important year in my life...as ppl say the make or break year ...the result of all my efforts in my life are going to culminate finally to the kind of job i land up with(as i have no inclination for further studies)!!Quitely i was pretty confident in my abilities but still i believe that life is a sine curve ..it has troughs and it has highs as well (so was not sure what part my fate will play)!
But as soon as i landed at Bombay on fateful 20th july ..i immediately fell in to the trough of life !Like always it was my best friend MithunD whose invlauable suggestion saved virtually my life !
I was supposed to join institute on 20th july and infact that was the day i was landing in India.The Profs in department decided to deal this trend strictly this time and latecomers from foreign internship were to be punished severly.
When i was online on 21st at Mumbai,Mithun suggested me to get some medical certificates along with me else i will be in deep soup!!
I landed in kgp on 23rd jul and came to know that there exists a real possibility that i might not be able to register for this sem!!Immediltely i was under extreme stress and was unable to sleep .....i went to BC Roy that day and also got an extra medical certificate.......I was panicking at times and met our FACAD with extremely pale face ...showed him medical certificate with my zombie like face and health and he just said-"Yours seems to be a genuine case...u r allowed to register!!"
My joy new no bounds,it seemed that gods have smiled on me yet again....When i came out of his office..just after closing the door ...i leapt in air with a silent WOOOOOHOOOO(Oh god!if he happened to see me at that time,he might be tempted to tear his hair apart)
This again reinforreced my belief that in IIT if u try to f*** with system ...system will definitely come and get u (courtesy:Chetan Bhagat source:Five Point Someone)!!
Anyways in panic mode i chose all the wrong subjects in the semester!
All the subjects involved assignments and term projects along with an extremly tough design lab project and obviously a ten credit master's project!
Total 29 credits !!
I chose following subject and i will give here the story of each and every subject...
NLP-natural language processing--This is the course i took because the prof. has history of not caring about attendance and projects.But things went wrong immediately....
the peace course turned out to be a bit too tough to handle and also assignmnt and 40% weightage to project made the course a bit tricky read "a difficult pill to swallow".
It was really a pain in ass to formulate the project for this course among all the kind of other projects going on in life !Then i mined a published paper and decided to implement it all again and get results !Though this is not an ideal way of doing a term project but i know the ppl who had cheated more than us...infact ppl directly used commercial s/w ...got results and showed them in presentation !
Finally after lot of scripts etc project was ready and after a good midsem i managed to study noting for endsems and finally surprisingly grade 'B' in the subject(i was expecting a D to be precise).
VLSI Testing and verifiaction--This was my third mistake i.e taking a subject of ISG(our facad).
Anyways it was completely poles apart to the likening of my tastes and somehow we managed to finish the project and I finally got a C.
Object Oriented Systems--This course by RK was pretty much a peace course for me as i like to believe that i know abt OOP as well as anybody but still i learned a lot form the course ...Numerous assignments were really irritating and also by god's grace we managed to finish a big extra assignment at end !
Such was the amount of load at the end that i gave my barclays capital test at 7 pm ...prepared the OOSI seminar till 4 am and mugged up economics till 7 am ....gave economics test from 7:30 am to 8:30 am, ...presented a seminar successfully(and also helped mypartner in preseting it :) ) from 8:45 am to 9:15 am.Didn't feel like studying for endsem for this exam and got an 'A' finally!
Economics--This HSS breadth was more of an underdog for me.I didn't wish to take this subject as my breadth,but somehow i got it.Since i was the only student from 2002 batch to take this subject ...it do feel awkward at times...sitting among all the juniors...with no familiar face in the class .I decided to follow 'attend the classes sicerely' for this subject.And the strategy work b'fully ...didn't have to put much effort in this subject and also didn't write much bullshit in exam(as compared to other HSS exams) and landed up with a cool swanky 'A' in the subject.
DesignLab--I was assigned a really strict prof with the design lab and since our curriculum is based on MIT so this is kinda necesaary evil of 4 credits...I was assigned to make a GUI graph library ...so far so good...i liked the idea and really wanted to make this thing extra special
So i learned whole VC++ from scratch and in the process learnt a lot about the visual studio.net.
I had to design the architecture of the software so that there are minimum possible bugs and low coupling among the modules.Also it was a really good experience to go through all the graph algorithm in deep when i didn't do an advanced graph theory course.
I wil post the snapshot of the software later.But i assure u that its one of my best creations till date.
By midsems i was just making the prototype of the software and was really frustrated with non availability of a graph layout algorithm/code on the internet.My supervisor for the project awarded me a zero for the effort till midsem and i was given a warning of getting an 'F' in the project.But i knew in the back of my mind that i will be able to finish the project just in time and might get an EX.Finally i managed to get an 'EX' after writing 10312 lines of code!!!
Master's project--The story of how i landed up with my present master's project is really an amusing one :) ! The story goes like this... that once upon a time i was working on binary decision diagrams(for poor non-technical souls... in short,it means a tough problem!) during my btech project ..and i was really pissed off working on that and hated my guide to waste my resources on such a wasteful project....so when i came back from ireland ..i was pretty sure that i am gonna ditch my old guide for a new prof.
But that simple old fellow is really a true gentleman...when i entered his office to break the news ...he smiled on seeing me and said-'Welcome Back,which project would u like to work on this time ?!' ...I was caught totally offguard....I hurriedly blureted out-'ummm....Sir to be frank with i don't like working in VLSI...i would love to work in field of networks...ur other research interest'....he smiled and said-'OK! i have got a new research scholar ...he is working on P2P ...u should contact him and formulate ur project'....so he put the ball in my court now ....
Unfortuanately ....guy suggested me a project which after reading some papers i was convinced is gonna take atleast ten years in india(groups at MIT and Stanford are working on distributed network simulator for 10 years now!!!)...on top of that he suggested that i shud have joint guides ...i told the problem to the other guide that this project is simply infeasible in 1 year and a dead end is inevitable down the road ...He tried to convince me that i should work on this project and he will defend me in the panel ...but i knew the writing on the walll and decided to revert back to my old simple guide and started working on process parameter variation...
New troubles were awaiting me on this project.....we simply didn't have the tool required to do what we wanted to do ...i corresponded with the reasearch team at univ of michigan who were working on the same thing and tried to work with CADANCE at AVLSI lab ...but all the effort turned futile and 1 month before the end of sem we were still stranded at the same point where we started the project.....
I met my guide and told him the problem that the tool HSPICE isn't licensed at IIT and hence i can't do this project ....so he suggested that i should do C programming and write my own tool to do this from scratch(now mind u .... the work is not easy !)I am a comp sc student and i was asked to look at the chip fabrication details,leakage current etc and formulate models/low power models and then code and then get results ....It's a herculean task even for seasoned campaigner in this field(EDA companies precisely do this withteams of hunderds and earn millions of dollars).
Luckily...i though smart and got the code of the PHD ...and modified it for my use ...ran monte carlo simulation...got results.... and on the D-day panel was gasping that i did so much work in just 4 months :)...i was awarded a cool EX finally and i was elated(I am really lucky !)....So as ppl say ...all is well that ends well!!
Conclusively,It was simply an awesome feeling when this semester ended ...We enjoyed the most in this semester in ourt IIT lives .....we worked extremely hard and partied almost every evening at Park/LS/PD ....me pondy sengu dhali and occasionally ravia formed the cool gang ...discussing...loathing...laughing at the ordeal called 9th semester....
I would say the biggest thing which this semester gave to me was to give me the quite confidence ,that i am ready to take anything head-on in this world.I am not afraid of extreme workloads,pressure,stress anymore ....as i have found the key to 'art of living' :D......
Comments are welcome !
posted by maxi @ 2:57 PM
