NOTE: For continuity, read chapters 1-4 before jumping to 5. This serious narrative tone and the boring picture-less narrative style again continues as this is also mostly abt academics.
CHAPTER 5- RUNNING THROUGH THE QUARTER...THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY PARTS
Scientific data management classes became more and more monotonous by the passing day, but being a small class, it was easy to attract the professor’s attention by answering questions and shooting a few of my own. Thus the prof got to know me pretty well in the good way. That was the sole reason for me to refrain from bunking those classes. It was also worth attending those classes to listen to a couple of nerds in that class conversing. It was simply hilarious to listen to them discuss about trivial things with all the seriousness in the world. I’ll give you a couple of examples. This one time, they were talking about digging the earth, one guy said "What will happen if we dig a hole though the earth from one end to another". The other guy said "that’s a good idea... we should do that and find out whether the magma will flow into space through the holes". The first guy says again "we can pump the magma out and then we can jump into one end and we can quickly commute to the other end". The second guy replies "But one thing to consider- do we jump in head first or legs first? I guess it’s important to determine which is safer before jumping. We don’t wanna be flying out of the other end with our legs up". And all this with a poker straight face. I tell you it was no joke that they were discussing. They were dead serious. Another time they were discussing about how it would be if there were no guns nowadays. How Sadaam Hussein and Osama would be fighting with the US forces with swords and shields and they laughed their asses off as if it was the funniest thing said. I laughed my ass off too, but at them. However they were very sharp in class with the coursework. But to listen to them talk among themselves was enough motivation for me to turn up for that class.
Programming languages was a class I was starting to enjoy, as the first few weeks were about how programming languages should be designed so that they can be compiled easily, similar to how compilers should be designed to process programming languages, which is what we studied in the compiler design course I had taken. I showed my enthu for the subject by being very active in class and I developed quite a reputation for myself in that class among other students (from what a couple of people told me later) and with the professor as well. Later on, as the course got monotonous, when I was too bored to listen to the class, I would be busy watching the girl next to me draw cartoons on her notebook, or looking at a bunch of guys multi-playing some game on their iphones or just looking at one guy sitting in the first bench under the prof’s nose and snoring so loudly that the prof had to pause often in the lecture. But the thing I will remember that class most for is the friends I made during that course. This bunch was the core bunch of people at UC Davis that I’ve kept in touch with even now.
Graphics was as enjoyable as usual. There was never a dull moment in that class, for Ken taught it very well and also because the class was very competitive, good mind-boggling questions kept coming up every now and then. I initially had this impression, often spread in India that the people in the US are pretty dumb and even an average student from India goes there and ends up the best among the Americans easily. Even Obama backed this in a press conference recently. I realized how much of a distortion that was. I am not sure if I felt it because my experience stems from one of the top schools, most difficult to get into but I would say it would take some work for an Indian to go there and do well academically. It is probably because of a lot of factors like having to get used to the system of education, which they already have because of which they have an edge. I will elaborate on this a little later. But this said, intellect-wise, the average American I saw was in no way inferior to an average Indian by means of intellect. Maybe the sample set I had was above average, but that’s how I saw it.
I was doing well in all the classes understanding the theory, I was doing well in assignments and quizzes, but there was one place where I faced problems especially in programming languages and that were the assignments. The first assignment was to make our own compiler for converting E programming language (hadn’t heard of it before that class) into C code. I had taken a whole course on compiler design in SRM, but the way we were taught never induced us to think about making one on our own. Now after 4 hrs of unrelated lecture, we had to learn what was necessary on our own and build a compiler. This was a difficult task for someone who had been rotting the last 3 years in SRM's curriculum. First I had to unlearn what half-cooked stuff we had learned here and relearn the stuff from the right angle. It was an uphill task all through, so I was a step behind the class all the time, as far as the assignments were concerned. It was however made up by my performance in the first mid-term, where I was in the top 3 of the class of 50, which was a commendable achievement for a person taking an exam for the first time in the US system. I reveled at it mainly because it was an open book test and remembering stuff was the problem I’ve always had in exams in India. That was out of the window, now that I could bring my own notes and refer when I wanted to. So all I had to do was to think on the spot and refer the right notes and write the answer. I really enjoyed the exam and did as well as expected.
Scientific data management assignments were very theory-based and being Indian automatically implies being good at theory, so I unsurprisingly did well in those. Also my performance in the midterm was well above the class mean. So I was happy with how I was doing there. As far as graphics was concerned, the assignments were difficult (from drawing cartoon characters using chaikin’s curve algorithm where I drew Apu to modeling Bainer hall...(umm...bathroom tiles as AZ described it :D) but graphics being my area of interest, I found it interesting. So I did fairly well in them and Ken's liberal grading helped me keep up with a very competitive class. There was no mid-term for the class. Just the final at the end, which I was confident that I’ll do well in, as Ken's exams are math-based and Indians in general are very good at math apart from theory in general.
A couple of weeks after the quarter started, and after Ken got to know us, we (me and JD) started approaching him to see if there was something we could do to get into his lab. We finally got to meet him in his office and we explained (rather I explained....not giving poor JD a chance to speak much as I often used to do, which I realized later after being told by him...Sorry about that mate... I changed that later however) how interested we were in graphics (I probably used my trademark "we’ve come here for a couple of quarters" catchphrase...eh JD?). He listened to us and immediately asked us if we wanted to see his lab. We couldn’t believe our ears. We enthusiastically nodded and he took us to the academic surge building after locking his office and took us on a half an hour tour of the IDAV labs, and introduced us to a few of his Phd students. He explained all the research that was going on patiently. Coming to think of it, I was rather overcome by the occasion and was wondering what I did to deserve this. I am talking to one of the great research minds and a highly respected person in the field of scientific visualization, and he is explaining all that he is doing, taking me on a tour of his lab, taking time off his busy schedule just for me. I felt insignificant, thinking about his achievements and contrasting it to nothing major I had. But his friendly manner and treatment of me as a person on par with him made me feel good again. He then finally introduced us to one of his postdocs, Eduard and told us we can start working with him on acoustic visualization. Eduard was a nice intelligent looking chap, whose English however wasn’t that strong as he had just come from Germany and his accent was difficult to understand and his speech was way too soft to hear without an amplifier. So it took some effort to understand what he said. We started working on some stuff Eduard gave us on acoustic visualization. Ken had got us proximity scanner cards for entry to the IDAV labs and also given us the keys to the academic surge building. We felt important and made plans about how we would spend all our free time in the labs. But alas!!! We never really had much of that after that point in the quarter. So we couldn’t really work on it as much as we wanted, without compromising on course grades.
(TO BE CONTINUED... NEXT POST WEDNESDAY, 26nd AUG)
