MY EXPERIENCES IN CALIFORNIA : Chapter 4

NOTE: For continuity, read chapters 1-3 before jumping to 4. This post has a kind of serious narrative tone about it because it is about academics.

CHAPTER 4- Beginning of classes and Project woes

All the good fun things have to come to an end. That’s a universal law in life and though we want it to be defied each time but it never is. It was Sep 22nd already and was time for the start of the fall quarter. We were really looking forward to it actually, as we wanted to get a real taste of the American education system that’s so favorably talked about but we knew we couldn’t have that much fun as the first few days when we were jobless.

The first day was orientation, where the all GSP (Global study program) students assembled and we were briefed about the system and about UCD. We were issued our ID cards and from then, we were as much a student of the University of California as any of its other undergrads and that gave us a sense of pride and belonging.
I had got the courses I wanted- Programming languages (which I like because of its similarity to compiler design which I love), Scientific data management (which I was forced to take as I had to satisfy some core subject equivalents in SRM), and finally Computer Graphics (which has been and which will be my area of interest).

Computer Graphics was my first class ever at UCD, and JD (who was also in that class) and I went really early to scheduled classroom to find that the classroom had shifted to another room. We went to the other room and found we were unsurprisingly the first there. Gradually people started dripping in and then streaming in and then flowing in as it was just time for the class to begin. It was a minute late from the scheduled time that an elderly amiable-looking man with a French beard came into the room with a smile and I recognized him to be Dr. Ken Joy who was the one of the most senior professors at UCD and a pioneer in the field of visualization and the director of the IDAV research at UCD. It was a great feeling to see him- a man who had directly contributed to the research that our professors teach us about in India- in flesh.

What brought me out of this reverie was his opening sentence that I will never forget "Aah this is the graphics class I am looking for indeed. I initially went to the originally scheduled room, and I found the class filled with girls. Girls! Now that’s the last thing a computer science professor, lest a graphics professor would expect to find in his class. So I realized I must be in the wrong room, and only then I noticed the announcement for the change in the room. Now this looks like a graphics classroom, as I see no girls." We all laughed at this wonderful ice-breaker and I was taken aback by his good nature and humor. Indeed I looked around the class, and I found no girl (Well there was actually a girl(who we nicknamed Rhino- no real offense meant, but on first sight she did look like one, so Ken can be forgiven for not noticing her...anyway she dropped out after a few classes) there at all in a class of 40. I cursed my luck as hitting on blonde was one of my goals for the trip, but was really excited to have Ken as my prof.

The class turned out to be wonderful, as he delved deeper into the mathematics on which graphics is based. JD and I came out of that class, really sad that it was over already. We talked to him at the end of class and introduced ourselves, as we wanted him to get to know us and look out for us as we wanted to work under him in his research lab in the future.

From there, it was time to go to the Programming Languages class. After Ken's wonderful class, my expectations were high. Probably too high. It is always a problem if you taste the sweetest thing first, your expectation becomes too high and you find nothing as sweet. This is kind of what happened to me. Prof. Su's lecture was pretty good I must say, but that friendliness and humor factor was never there. You never felt at ease in his class. Especially the first class, he seemed to be a more of a teacher than a professor. You’ll understand the distinction between the two if you’ve studied in India. He explained trivial stuff like "You shouldn’t cheat on exams and assignments. Else you’ll be punished- sent to the SJA or some such council for which I don’t even know the expansion (uh huh... Blue flamez…no comments on it please :D). You should be honest. You should do your homework. Else you’ll lose your grade." As if it takes a genius to figure it out. These are things no decent student who wouldn’t think of cheating would want to be told about, but then has to listen to always. Except for the stiffness in his tone, and his attitude, there was nothing I had against Prof. Su, as his teaching was really sound. And his research was really exciting. I came out of that class having realized I’ve to lower my expectations of professors here which had shot up after Ken's class.

The next day, all three of us (MS, JD and I) had Scientific Data Management. This was one course I wasn't looking forward to, as database management has never been my field of interest. I always found it void of logic and thinking and felt it was a dry subject where you keep following known practices. Dr. Bertram Ludaescher handled that course with Dr. Shaun Bowers (Sobers as MS was to call him later…:) ) to take care of the genomics angle as the data we were going to learn to manage was genetic data. Bertram's German accent was very noticeable and it was a little difficult to catch what he was saying at first. The class was as dry as expected, but then the professors seemed friendly and good-natured. Besides it was a class of only about 15 people and quite a few were from other departments. The course taught people how to manage data in their respective fields using computers. So it was an exciting class for its diversity. But it was a class I never looked forward too much to.

This class was also the only one where we had to do a final project, and the professors to make teams of 3 or less and think of ideas. I initially befriended someone, and was going to do the project with her and JD and MS, but then had to give that up as we thought it was better for everyone that just we roomies work on it as we can adapt our schedule to find time to work on it as a team and also because we weren’t going to concentrate much on it because we were going to start working in Ken's lab hopefully (:D). So I had to break off with her and unsurprisingly, she wasn’t really happy about it. We named that the "break up incident".

Then the three of us sought JB's help with choosing a project, and resourceful as he is, he gave us ideas which if implemented would win us Nobel prizes. I’ve often wondered how JB comes up with such amazing wonderful ideas that no one person can think of but am even more surprised why he himself doesn’t work on them with the same vigor to implement them, which he is totally capable of. He is one of the most remarkable minds I’ve known, and if he keeps his focus and drive from thinking of an idea to implementing it, I am sure he’ll be a Nobel laureate. Anyway… we finally zeroed upon an idea that we felt we could implement. It was about retrieving some data from the DDBJ database (a genome database) and extracting necessary information and analyzing what the user wants and displaying it to him. We were happy with our proposal and when we submitted it, our profs were happy with it too. Thus our first week came to an end with a couple more amazing graphics classes and a pretty good programming language class.

(TO BE CONTINUED... NEXT POST SATURDAY, 22nd AUG)