Sorry for the hiatus , my exams were going on and I couldn't post much. If you are reading this then let me start by saying "Its Good to Be Back".
Exams were really a hoot, I have realized my concentration span has almost reduced to zero and follows the 10-30 rule. What is the 10-30 rule you ask ?... 10 minutes of Study corresponds to 30 minutes of Random Musings about Life, The Universe and Everything. My random musings have consisted of thinking about my future life in Pittsburgh , some fond memories of my last semester and my grossly ambitious plan to change this world. All these thoughts come during exams or well come more frequently during exams.
Another eventful thing happened, my sister's Board Exams result came out. She did really well given she has Humanities and everyone is really happy for her. I feel like an ass for sleeping through the morning of her result but still I got to order out food the whole day amidst all the celebrations. She did the same when I got my results, it was only fair.
On the day of the last exam we had a great freaking time. Went to a nearby restaurant called "Spiceshot" (awesome name in my opinion) and 6 of us decided to order and drink "openly" , no restrictions. Of course my drinking was restricted to the Mocktails menu but our table was a sight to see with all the glasses and bottles of vodka, tequila, gin etc . We then saw Pirates of Carribean which I didn't like too much except the awesome reclining seats in the cinema.....and our meal at McDonalds afterwards. Seriously, I really love the McVeggie burger, I love digging into it after a long time. Picking a bunch of fries and smoothing it over with a long sip of Sprite is one of the best feelings in the world. Coming back to the hostel we danced like crazy and one of my friends was dancing with his rayBan shades on at 2 in the night. Such was the night . (It was Legen-wait for it - Dary !! )
I caught a bus back home at 6 in the morning. Bus rides or Metro rides alone are fun . I think a lot during the one hour commute about life in general and how I screwed up / did well in the week gone by. Staring out of the window and watching people and places pass by gives me a calm feeling. These Bus/Metro rides will be one of the things I will miss about Delhi. Sure they are crowded sometimes but you can just stand there and get lost in your own world. 50 strangers just heading down the same path.
I have 2 months left now before I leave this country (forever ??...who knows ). Sometimes I think about coming back after a long time , 10 years or so, and seeing all my friends again...its fun to imagine someone as a rich banker , someone as an innovator , someone a big programming hot shot and the usual awesomely well taken care of assortment of MBA's :) . It would be fun to exchange stories and discuss how the the rivers of our lives took separate paths. But until these 10 years pass, I am presently looking for some work in these 2 months , mostly just to distract myself from the staticness and a couple of thoughts that are persistently there on my mind (maybe we"ll discuss those later) . I will also learn to Cook , Drive, Iron my shirt , Tie a Tie...things other teenagers did well before me. This will be a lot of work but fun work nonetheless..and I will actually learn well this time.....not like the time I youtubed "How to Tie a Tie" before our college farewell. :)
P.S. -
1.This was a boring post but a post nonetheless, the coming week has some exciting
opportunities and events will post about them once done.
2. My TEDxNSIT video is out, the one I mentioned in the blog post titled "The Talk"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NylRpcE3Oc
Hope you like it :)
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Thursday, May 26, 2011
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
My Teaching Assistantship
This past semester I was a Teaching Assistant for the Embedded Systems course at a university (located temporarily) inside my university ( Inception ? ) called IIIT-Delhi. I was lucky enough to work on a project there for sometime and now I had been offered this job by my professor. I went home and told this to my parents and their expression was the virtual equivalent of "LOL. What can you possibly teach anyone ? " .
This was exactly the question I asked myself before starting off. Technically, I was supposed to take Lab classes to teach 3rd year students programming and interfacing with AVR microcontrollers. Although , I would like to think I have reached an intermediate level in knowing these controllers but still I was worried as to how I would get my point across to students , given my general "awkwardness" and the worst timing with jokes ( cracking jokes when a girl is crying is not cool, NOW I KNOW ) .
So , I went for Day One. I thought I would dress all formal but decided against it (only because I woke up 10 minutes before the class ). Turned out to be a good decision , I think I might have freaked them out in formals and then I would have had to dress like that in every class. Anyway so there they were about 25-30 of them all looking at me eagerly and I am just staring with a marker in hand. Eventually I just decided to go with the flow and started going from the very basics like Bitwise Operations to the different features of the controller. As it was the first class , I knew I had to make this "exotic" course appeal to them. Exotic becuase these students were champs on the software side but had very little hardware experience. So , I wanted to make them enjoy the world of LED's , Resisitors , Capacitors etc (They would know later on how bad life is while debugging hardware problems :-) ).
I wrote a simple program on the board...went over each line explaining what each line did and what it corresponded in the physical world. And then I helped them setup their kit and in sometime I could see about 30 LED's blinking. I saw a few people excited about the first class...or maybe they were happy that class was over. Either way the first class was definitely fun. A new experience...one of many in my last semester.
The next couple of classes were more hardware oriented...we had an intro to Soldering for example. Basically , I tried to go over the things I had trouble with while learning things on my own from the internet or books here and there. So I wanted to make it a smooth transistion for them.
Another fun thing was grading the students :-). I now realized how the teacher feels while grading...and how stupidly nervous I am about the weirdest of things. Taking Demos and Vivas was fun. I could easily see which students matched some of my own friends in class...it was fun to be honest . I was also fair while grading..infact I was a little lenient :P . And at least this was the only thing I was proud of doing perfectly during my stint.
I don't know how the students liked me. I tried my best. Being just one year senior to them would have been weird for them...but I admire them for being patient with me. They would call me "Sir" while I would be drinking Coffee with a friend at the college cafe...I would get quite shy to be honest. If they ever saw me in my own class they would know how big a fool I am...I think some of them already know this :-).
At the end of the semester , I saw some of their projects....I was pretty amazed by the fact that it took them just 2 months to go from a completely new idea to implementation that too in their first experience with hardware. But the credit for that goes more to my professor than to me...but at least I helped someone learn something in this world. Hopefully, they would use this knowledge to make something completely awesome that helps a lot of people. I had a great time as a Teaching Assistant...helped me finance my dinners outside too :-)
P.S.- If you were one of the students who had to bear me... I apologize for the poor inventory management in the Lab. It will be much more professional in the coming years. I hope I wasn't too bad... :-)
This was exactly the question I asked myself before starting off. Technically, I was supposed to take Lab classes to teach 3rd year students programming and interfacing with AVR microcontrollers. Although , I would like to think I have reached an intermediate level in knowing these controllers but still I was worried as to how I would get my point across to students , given my general "awkwardness" and the worst timing with jokes ( cracking jokes when a girl is crying is not cool, NOW I KNOW ) .
So , I went for Day One. I thought I would dress all formal but decided against it (only because I woke up 10 minutes before the class ). Turned out to be a good decision , I think I might have freaked them out in formals and then I would have had to dress like that in every class. Anyway so there they were about 25-30 of them all looking at me eagerly and I am just staring with a marker in hand. Eventually I just decided to go with the flow and started going from the very basics like Bitwise Operations to the different features of the controller. As it was the first class , I knew I had to make this "exotic" course appeal to them. Exotic becuase these students were champs on the software side but had very little hardware experience. So , I wanted to make them enjoy the world of LED's , Resisitors , Capacitors etc (They would know later on how bad life is while debugging hardware problems :-) ).
I wrote a simple program on the board...went over each line explaining what each line did and what it corresponded in the physical world. And then I helped them setup their kit and in sometime I could see about 30 LED's blinking. I saw a few people excited about the first class...or maybe they were happy that class was over. Either way the first class was definitely fun. A new experience...one of many in my last semester.
The next couple of classes were more hardware oriented...we had an intro to Soldering for example. Basically , I tried to go over the things I had trouble with while learning things on my own from the internet or books here and there. So I wanted to make it a smooth transistion for them.
Another fun thing was grading the students :-). I now realized how the teacher feels while grading...and how stupidly nervous I am about the weirdest of things. Taking Demos and Vivas was fun. I could easily see which students matched some of my own friends in class...it was fun to be honest . I was also fair while grading..infact I was a little lenient :P . And at least this was the only thing I was proud of doing perfectly during my stint.
I don't know how the students liked me. I tried my best. Being just one year senior to them would have been weird for them...but I admire them for being patient with me. They would call me "Sir" while I would be drinking Coffee with a friend at the college cafe...I would get quite shy to be honest. If they ever saw me in my own class they would know how big a fool I am...I think some of them already know this :-).
At the end of the semester , I saw some of their projects....I was pretty amazed by the fact that it took them just 2 months to go from a completely new idea to implementation that too in their first experience with hardware. But the credit for that goes more to my professor than to me...but at least I helped someone learn something in this world. Hopefully, they would use this knowledge to make something completely awesome that helps a lot of people. I had a great time as a Teaching Assistant...helped me finance my dinners outside too :-)
P.S.- If you were one of the students who had to bear me... I apologize for the poor inventory management in the Lab. It will be much more professional in the coming years. I hope I wasn't too bad... :-)
Monday, May 2, 2011
The Talk
So we were having this event in college for the 2nd year running called TEDxNSIT. For people unfamiliar with the TEDx concept...TED is basically an annual conference where people from different realms come and give awesome talks. These fields can vary from Technology to Bacteria to Underwater Exploration. A TEDx conference is an independently organized event on similar lines...but say by an organization/institute which has got the requisite license to hold such an event with the "TED" name.
All the technicalities apart we were having one college and somehow I was asked by my friend Roshan (who was heading the Organizing) to come and be one of the Speakers and speak about one of my research projects. Now a lot of other people had done so much better work than me in college that it felt pretty weird to come and talk about my work. Nevertheless, it had been a long time since I faced an audience (I don't walk on the ramp nor do I play the guitar...why else would people see you on a stage in college ????) so I decided to give it a go. It was going to be a change anyway from the staticness (or gloominess ??) of life in recent days.
Anyway, so I prepared my presentation not in your usual Powerpoint but a cool software called Prezi (thanks to my friend Gaangil for the tip). I guess initially I was a little nonchalant about it...but about a week left for the talk I started preparing in my hostel room...looking at the window and trying to speak. Somehow I always used to stammer..I speak too fast sometimes , I think there are too many thoughts in my head somehow. One day before I knew what I had to speak, I didn't write anything down it was in my head and either it would work out well or I would have to completely revamp my strategy at giving these talks.
D-DAY
On the day, I woke up at about noon...the event had already started at 10 am. I somehow manged to get ready by 2 and reached backstage. I was nervous you know...I felt like a kid amongst all the speakers. This awesome lady from NID was going over her slides and I was like WOW !! she will definitely give a good talk (She did infact give a great talk ) . Puneet Sahani a hitchiker by profession came in front of me and wrote 4 complete pages for his talk in about 20 minutes. Its like he had so much to say. I on the other hand was hanging out with Ankit Agarwal who was discussing (of all things) girls with me, in hindsight it did calm me down a little, although I had very little to contribute to the conversation.
This was also the day I was suddenly drinking Red Bull which I find absolutely vile and worse than cough syrup. But I had so much nervous energy that I needed something to drink. One of my friends Pragya was also backstage and there I was holding a Red Bull can and chatting with her. Talking did help reduce nervousness...Pragya if you're reading this..Thanks :-)
By the time my turn came, there were a couple of awesome talks that had already taken place. I was nervous going on stage and when I got up the light was directly on my face (that hurt !!). But I adjusted and as soon as I faced the audience there were no more inhibitions. I started off with the talk and I knew when to pause and try to crack a joke (No One Laughed...which left some awkward seconds for me to fill).
The crux of my talk was an DEMO that would require someone to call my mobile phone and press buttons on his keypad, this would then turn on a light bulb kept on my table. Somehow with the help of my friend Udit Aggarwal (whose wry wit on stage won one and all ), I managed to pull this off and I would like to think it looked mildly cool on stage. There was some applause in the middle...a lot of my friends had turned up but I do hope they were sincere :-). I was pretty relieved when I was on the last slide. I took out my mic and just took a deep breath getting off the stage. I then went back to my hostel room and did what I do best...open the door and fall on the bed with my shoes on.
AFTERMATH
I came next evening to see a huge poster with all the Speakers' photo on it. My photo was there too on the bottom right corner...it felt nice in a way...it also felt a little weird.
Standing there staring at myself I realized two things -
1. I need a better photo
2. I need to do something worthwhile with my life. You know "I want to change lives"
is a cliched line but somewhere I definitely want to figure out how I can improve
lives in the lower strata. (Maybe a trip back to my village awaits)
Lets see what the future holds !!
P.S. - I didn't want to bore you with the project details. A video of the talk will be out soon , you can see the talk and the project (MELOS it is called ) in the video itself.
Hope you guys are good. More ramblings next time !!
All the technicalities apart we were having one college and somehow I was asked by my friend Roshan (who was heading the Organizing) to come and be one of the Speakers and speak about one of my research projects. Now a lot of other people had done so much better work than me in college that it felt pretty weird to come and talk about my work. Nevertheless, it had been a long time since I faced an audience (I don't walk on the ramp nor do I play the guitar...why else would people see you on a stage in college ????) so I decided to give it a go. It was going to be a change anyway from the staticness (or gloominess ??) of life in recent days.
Anyway, so I prepared my presentation not in your usual Powerpoint but a cool software called Prezi (thanks to my friend Gaangil for the tip). I guess initially I was a little nonchalant about it...but about a week left for the talk I started preparing in my hostel room...looking at the window and trying to speak. Somehow I always used to stammer..I speak too fast sometimes , I think there are too many thoughts in my head somehow. One day before I knew what I had to speak, I didn't write anything down it was in my head and either it would work out well or I would have to completely revamp my strategy at giving these talks.
D-DAY
On the day, I woke up at about noon...the event had already started at 10 am. I somehow manged to get ready by 2 and reached backstage. I was nervous you know...I felt like a kid amongst all the speakers. This awesome lady from NID was going over her slides and I was like WOW !! she will definitely give a good talk (She did infact give a great talk ) . Puneet Sahani a hitchiker by profession came in front of me and wrote 4 complete pages for his talk in about 20 minutes. Its like he had so much to say. I on the other hand was hanging out with Ankit Agarwal who was discussing (of all things) girls with me, in hindsight it did calm me down a little, although I had very little to contribute to the conversation.
This was also the day I was suddenly drinking Red Bull which I find absolutely vile and worse than cough syrup. But I had so much nervous energy that I needed something to drink. One of my friends Pragya was also backstage and there I was holding a Red Bull can and chatting with her. Talking did help reduce nervousness...Pragya if you're reading this..Thanks :-)
By the time my turn came, there were a couple of awesome talks that had already taken place. I was nervous going on stage and when I got up the light was directly on my face (that hurt !!). But I adjusted and as soon as I faced the audience there were no more inhibitions. I started off with the talk and I knew when to pause and try to crack a joke (No One Laughed...which left some awkward seconds for me to fill).
The crux of my talk was an DEMO that would require someone to call my mobile phone and press buttons on his keypad, this would then turn on a light bulb kept on my table. Somehow with the help of my friend Udit Aggarwal (whose wry wit on stage won one and all ), I managed to pull this off and I would like to think it looked mildly cool on stage. There was some applause in the middle...a lot of my friends had turned up but I do hope they were sincere :-). I was pretty relieved when I was on the last slide. I took out my mic and just took a deep breath getting off the stage. I then went back to my hostel room and did what I do best...open the door and fall on the bed with my shoes on.
AFTERMATH
I came next evening to see a huge poster with all the Speakers' photo on it. My photo was there too on the bottom right corner...it felt nice in a way...it also felt a little weird.
Standing there staring at myself I realized two things -
1. I need a better photo
2. I need to do something worthwhile with my life. You know "I want to change lives"
is a cliched line but somewhere I definitely want to figure out how I can improve
lives in the lower strata. (Maybe a trip back to my village awaits)
Lets see what the future holds !!
P.S. - I didn't want to bore you with the project details. A video of the talk will be out soon , you can see the talk and the project (MELOS it is called ) in the video itself.
Hope you guys are good. More ramblings next time !!
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