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)

MY EXPERIENCES IN CALIFORNIA : Chapter 3

Note: For continuity, read the first two parts of the series. This post isn't that comical (except the initial part) because most of it is about my solo adventures. And where there's no JD...there's no comedy :(

CHAPTER 3- A messy bubbly incident, the JD catalyst theory and my visit to the bay area

The days passed and we started getting into the Californian lifestyle and really started enjoying it. We spent most of the time on the internet streaming stuff because we hadn’t ever had the liberty of streaming videos in India with the net speeds here and this was a great revelation for us. As we were flabbergasted with the internet speeds (we got download speeds of 1 MBps), there was a person in the apartment who apparently was frustrated with the net as he found it way too slow. That was Hyun, who later told us that they get speeds 20 times as fast as this, all over South Korea. Oh boy! 20 megabytes in a second! That’s 100 MB in 5! A movie downloaded in 35 secs! Phew... I might go to Korea one day just to operate on that.

A hilarious thing that happened around that time was the toilet clogging incident and once again JD was the hero, rather the comedian and I played a part too. He mistook kitchen paper to be toilet paper (LOL) and tried to flush it down but as it was too thick, it didn’t go down the drain. But that’s not the end of the joke. After some scientific thinking, we (JD and I) came up with an idea that if we had some acidic substance, it might erode the paper away. We thought the dishwasher liquid might just serve the purpose. So we brought it and put it into the toilet and flushed. And voila… it became like a bathtub filled with foam, as the dishwasher liquid had obviously foamed when in contact with water and the toilet became a bathtub. We had succeeded in making it messier, if that was ever possible. :D

We had bought a football...ah sorry soccer ball, and were playing with it in the house (with AZ's enthu for soccer, that’s the least you can expect). AZ was our coach, and he spent his time teaching us tricks (I gotta say he was pretty good with it), and we did learn quite a bit. I gotta mention specifically about JD, because of something that followed. He used to try too many tricks at once and his legs and body couldn’t react to the speed his lightning quick mind was thinking. And so he often... let’s just say... messed (and JB…don’t comment “canteened up”) up.

Once when we were practicing power shots in the lawn, he was getting it all wrong as he just couldn’t connect with the ball properly. He tried umpteen times but couldn’t work it out. Suddenly we noticed a blonde girl walking her dog out on the lawns, watching us play. We pointed it out to JD and he looked for a moment at her and suddenly with his face steeled with determination, kicked the ball with a force Christiano Ronaldo would not be able to get on his free kick. Alas... Unfortunately I stood between him and the goal, and before I had any time to react, it hit me square on my stomach and I doubled up with pain the next few minutes. So all you need for JD to do something good is to have a girl watch him do it.

Another instance proving JD's catalyst theory was when our apartment mate brought a Japanese friend of his, to our apartment. For the record, let’s call her "Countryside". Just before she had come, we had been learning some tricks again at home from AZ. And I gotta say JD was having a really bad time, again doing too many things at a time, thereby flopping. He had just given up when she came. After a bit of chit-chat, when the talk came to soccer, JD's eyes suddenly lit up and he said "Lemme show you some tricks". We were all like "Ohhh.... hope he doesn’t make a fool of himself". Then to our amazement and Countryside's delight, he neatly lifted the ball, and did a 360 spin following it up with what was a near flip-flap and even attempting a rainbow kick. And he pulled it off pretty well. We just looked at each other and shook our heads. So now we knew what was necessary to make this guy play good soccer. Just load the stadium with girls. Preferably Chinkey (codenamed Chicklika or Chandralekha…lol) girls, as he has a thing for them.

Around this time, I decided to go to the bay area to visit two cousins I have in Santa Clara, and one in Cupertino. I hitched a ride with a couple of other girls from SRM, who were going to the bay area to visit their folks. Thanx ppl. So I spent a night and half a day at my cousin’s place, playing with her two kids. I was shocked at number of Asians in that place. Every person I saw (I mean EVERY) was either an Indian or a Chinese. I saw many people play cricket, clothes hung outside the house and many more typical signs of Indians dwelling in a place. I really felt at home there.

My cousin from Santa Clara came to pick me up from Cupertino in his new Audi A4 (cool car to have, San...) and took me to the Saravana Bhavan in the bay area. I was happy to get to eat some authentic Indian food, after a month's gap. It was quite a large restaurant, seating at least 200 people, and it was flooded with people flowing in and out. After a short wait, we got a table, and I got my first look at the menu card. I had got used to the dollar system and was no longer converting it to rupees, but the cost of the items in dollars was really vulgar. A plate of idly was 6 $ (Rs 300), a dosa was 10 $ (Rs 500), a masala dosa was 12 $ (Rs 600) and a meals was 15 $ (Rs 750). Half my appetite vanished looking at the menu, but then the aroma brought the appetite back and I had really enjoyed the food (which he paid for).

We then went to his apartment, and I met my other cousin as well. We unwinded and had a good afternoon chatting and learned so much about each other. Neither of them were the reserved homely people I was told by my parents they would be and I wasn’t the quite innocent person they had pictured as well. :) Lol it was fun getting to know we were all normal people on the same wavelength.

After a lot of debating and planning, we all went out in the evening to San Francisco to hang out in the night as SF is a great city to see with the lights on. We first went to the golden gate bridge, which was a bit of a disappointment because it wasn’t really visible as it was a heavily foggy day. Only the next 10 metres or so were visible, and so I could just mentally picture the glory of the whole bridge taken in one eyeful. We walked on the bridge a bit and then left the place.

We then drove around SF, which in itself is an exciting thing to do around the Lombard street areas, because of its Monaco grand prix like curves and slopes. We drove around downtown near the towering skyscrapers, which were a majestic sight when lit in the night. Now I experienced what the America that is showcased in movies and media was like. This is just a small part of the country, and most of the country is like Davis, with the tallest building in the city being not more than 3 storeys, or even worse with just barren land. The rich well-to-do parts are what are portrayed all the time. Watching other cars on the road was in itself an experience, and cars I had seen only in NFS-like games and on TV and magazines, were right before my eyes. Ferraris and Audis and Porsches...you name and it was there. This was in stark contrast to Cupertino where I noticed an excess of Japanese cars like Toyotas and Nissans. Every alternate car was a Toyota corolla. I guess it is no coincidence that there number of corollas and the number of Asians were proportionately high. It shows our attitude of looking for the cost of the car and the mileage it gives before choosing a car, which is why we prefer the cheap less-prestigious Toyotas. :D .

So after downtown, where there were some places we wanted to go to but couldn’t because...ah... I was...underage. Californian law totally sucks there, and this unfortunate handicap kept haunting me in the whole seven months I spent there. I am glad I have just turned 21 a couple of weeks ago. So no more babysitting for me when I go back there. And so from downtown, we went into Chinatown. There is only one way to describe it... it was China... It’s quite a large neighborhood with all shops, houses, buildings being run by Chinese. Everyone looked the same. We went to a Chinese restaurant and had some food, which I really enjoyed as it was authentic Chinese. It was pretty late by the time we were done and we drove back home to Santa Clara well past midnight.

The next day, we got up early (8 am...which is early of course) and drove to Santa Monica to the beach. I got my first feel of the Pacific Ocean then. After hanging out at beaches in Chennai, I forgot how water in oceans looks blue and so my first sight of the beach was breathtaking. The beach was like an amusement park with roller-coasters etc. I didn’t have time to ride them, but I guess it must have been a good experience to be in a roller-coaster overlooking the sea. There were a lot of people hanging out and sunbathing on the beach too, as it was just about the end of summer.

I then had a good breakfast there on a beach-side restaurant and from there, we drove to the mystery point, which is supposed to be this place where gravity behaves strangely. People cannot stand straight, they tend to lean towards a side, water moves from "lower" to "higher" level, a freely suspended ball moves "uphill". It really aroused my curiosity. It was as good as anticipated to see these "miracles", and the way the guide described it to us made it seem even more mysterious. However, it is just a simple concept where a cabin has been built on a hill after digging the hill such that "uphill" was made into "downhill". It was well made indeed I have to say.

After having a good time there, we drove back home to Santa Clara, where we unwinded a bit in the evening and then it was time to go. I again hitched a ride back with the girls in their car. Thanks San ‘n An for taking the effort to spend time showing me around the bay area. Hope to hang out much more this time.

(TO BE CONTINUED...NEXT POST TUESDAY, 18th AUG)