An open letter to incoming CS, IIT Roorkee students

Seeing that I left college a few days back, I've tried to write this post based on my experiences and observations. Also, although the title mentions IIT, CS and Roorkee, this post is pretty generic and many points are valid for all the engineering students. 

This post was written as an answer to the following question asked on Quora -  http://www.quora.com/Indian-Institute-of-Technology...

As you all will be beginning college now, I will be attending convocation and I hope these things will help you in the next four years of your life.

Insomnia - A Passion Fulfilled!

For those who don't know, Insomnia is the annual programming competition of IIT Roorkee organized by SDSLabs during Cognizance, the annual technical festival of IIT Roorkee.

IIT Roorkee, Main Building

IIT Roorkee is a historical place. With 150 years of history behind the college, the institute keeps on aggregating and encompassing all the novel activities that we students can ever think of! Insomnia is but one such activity in the ever-growing list of extra-curricular activities of college, albeit among the most important from a programmer's perspective.

ACM ICPC 2011, Kanpur

Programming is fun and awesome. Perhaps all these and more for me since this has been my major activity in college through and through. Two months back me, Mano and Sunny Agrawal went to IIT Kanpur for participating in regional finals of ACM ICPC 2011. That has been one of the pinnacles of my programming life till now. Note there are many more different pinnacles though.

IIT Kanpur has a beautiful campus! I can't believe at first site that peacocks roam around in the campus with absolute freedom. They are such beatiful creatures. And when they spread their wings for the few moments you get tha awww! look on your face. Everything about the visit to IIT Kanpur was great. The food and the fog, the campus and the competition.

IIT Roorkee has been participating in the competition seriously for last two years only perhaps. Last year the DirectI POTM Gunjan Sharma and his team got 11th rank. We did not expect much from the competition. So Mano and I set ourselves an achievable target of coming in the top 10.

On the day of competition,

My Sick Lappy!

Yes you got it! My laptop is sick! She doesn't wake up anymore. I don't know what has happened to her. Perhaps the motherboard is fried. Although I never saw smokes coming out.

In the past 3 years, my laptop has been my closest friend most of the time! I have done more crazy stuff on my laptop than probably in real life ...

I am planning to take my laptop to Dehradun, but I always feel lazy about the chore.
And in the meantime I am getting bored! The laziness needs to subside and I need to go to Dehradun quickly!!!

Thru My Lens: Google+

Of course, by now you must have noticed the changed color of top bar at Google (internally called sandbar). All the tech sites and news blogs have been filled with reams of articles on Google+ so anyone online is bound to sit and take notice. This is especially important since Google definitely wants a large number of people (more than half billion) to ultimately join it! But what I feel is that rather than going all guns blazing with this service, Google has tried to downplay it a bit, especially with their comment that this is just an initial offering and there is lots more to come.

Achievements @ CS-2K8 IITR

My batch CS, IIT Roorkee, 2008 has been going great guns. Interestingly almost all my batchmates have been able to get decent internships!!! Here I am going to list those that I remember.

My First Interview Experience

Every experience God gives us,

every person He puts in our lives,

is the perfect preparation for the future

that only He can see....

-Corrie ten Boom-

Finally I am able to write about my interview experience with Microsoft for summer intern position. Life gives us many interesting experiences that leave an indelible mark in our memory. We learn from those experiences and hopefully expect that it will somehow help us positively in tackling the future challenges of life. Perhaps I will never forget my first interview experience in a long time to come. I got the idea of writing this post after reading Amik's sir blog, so a heartfelt acknowledgement to him.

Our first mid-sem of the fifth semester had just been over on Friday. Everyone was in a relaxed mood. Happiness pervaded everywhere. Then in the evening came the shocking as well as amazing news that that Mcrosoft would be coming to campus on Monday for the presentation etc. Since this was the first company coming here, we were all little excited. Suddenly the next day seniors informed us that Microsoft usually takes written test and interviews on the same day as well. This bit of info had a little unsettling effect on some students and many went into preparation mode for the tests.

A trip to Shimla

One trip was what I had been pining for since a long time!!! It had been months which seem like years in college since I had been to a place far from R land. Of course I was jubilant cause new year offered the perfect opportunity!

Oft at times we discussed where to head. Although the discussions could go on incessantly, there was never a unanimous decision as to one place. Some prefer Shimla or some Mussourie while some preferred afternoon and  some the sunrise. In a large group like mine it is really tough to reach unanimity with people vacillating back and forth while some never budging from their stance.

On the night of 31st December, Riju came to my room, woke me up and told me we are going to Shimla and you are coming with us!!!

I rubbed my eyes, cleared my vision and then, "hmm... hmmm... wait wat?? Go over again!!!"

Riju, "Never mind! Go back to sleep you moron. I will wake you up at 5"

Me:"Zzz..."

At 5, a knock on the door and the shoutings of get up dumbo! Ever heard a nice way to wake up a guy Riju!

After five minutes of conversation I came to know that Riju, Hitesh, Rajat, Zuber and me are the five people leaving town right now for Chandigarh without any further plans whatsoever. One heck of a plan guys. Saket chickened out citing health reasons and Kshitij had some problems with timing. Health is still a plausible excuse but timing definitely a lame one. What a douchebag! Grow up Kshitij! Ah they will miss out on lots of fun, I think enviously but with pangs of sadness! Never mind consensus. At least we are going somewhere which is more than enough to excite me for the moment.

Thru My Lens: The Social Network

Given that I am a bit of a nerd myself, it is quite natural for me to like the movie. But apart from that it has been interesting to watch the story of the making of Facebook. What struck me as amazing was Mark Zuckerberg speaking monologues in monotone!!!

Thru My Lens: The Kite Runner

These days I have been watching a lot of movies. “The Kite Runner” happens to be among the very few which I liked. It is based on a novel of same name by Khaled Hosseini.

I watched it with my sis a few days back!!! Later in the day she looked it up on the net. As it is, it did receive a couple of Golden Globe nominations.

Among the interesting things etched in my memory from the movie, one story narrated by Amir goes like this:

One day a man finds a cup that turned his tears into pearls. The guy was very poor and he obviously wanted to become rich. Then the story ends with him sitting on a mountain of pearls along with his wife’s corpse.

But that’s not the amazing part. After this, Hassan (Amir’s friend) asks a question as to why the man had to kill his wife. He could have simply smelled onions!!!

Although the story is quite intuitive it allows me to pen one of my thoughts. Life is simple. We, the human beings make it unnecessarily complex. Often we don’t try to see the simplicity in things but rather it’s the complex part that appeals to us.

Later in the movie Hassan is accused of stealing Amir’s watch which he accepts immediately even though it is not a fault of his. Amir himself had kept this watch beneath Hassan’s pillow. This sort of backstabbing is very common place in today’s world. I just thought what would have happened if Amir behaved differently. He could have made it up with Hassan. Given the love of Hassan for Amir, he need not even have even have given a full blown apology. They could have enjoyed each other’s company for a while before getting separated. But most importantly, Amir would not be having pent up guilt for his not-so-pleasant behavior in future. Although Amir gets a chance of taking care of Hassan’s child, not everyone gets such an opportunity.

The movie gives a splendid account of the pre-war era Afghanistan. It definitely brought back some kite flying nostalgia. I wonder if ever again I will hold a kite in my hand! Two decades of war have wrecked Afghanistan, how many decades will it take before the country goes back to normalcy remains an unanswered question.

Definitely worth a watch!!! But a warning it is in no way a happy-go-lucky type movie…