TOEFL Scores!!!

I got my TOEFL scores today. 116/120. Reading : 30, Listening : 29, Speaking : 27, Writing : 30. Yippy!! Now eagerly waiting for my AGRE scores (I know they are going to be awesome).

So, now I can get over my TOEFL kela, report my TOEFL scores to the additional universities. Wrote my first draft of SOP and CV, have to finalize it. I have to goto NRS (Our department HOD) for sorting out the recommendations.

Crazy about this song I heard in lots of Series I watch (House MD, Smallville, etc) :

"You Can't Always Get What You Want" - Rolling Stones

No, you can't always get what you want
You can't always get what you want
You can't always get what you want
And if you try sometime you find
You get what you need...

Why I am an atheist?

A really inspiring article by Bhagat Singh : here

TOEFL & AGRE Over

After the screw up of missing my TOEFL date, I finally gave it on Nov 2. It was decent. I will get my scores in 20 days. I kind of rushed through the reading of passages. Speaking section was decent.

Immediately after that I had to go to Coimbatore for my AGRE. Stayed in Hotel Tamil Nadu. Had a hard time finding the Test center, but this time I had woken up (couldn't sleep much actually) at 5:00 am, and left 3 hours prior to the exam time. I solved the AGRE paper with clockwork precision. First pass over the questions in 2 hours, and I had confidently solved 48 questions. A second pass left only 4 questions about which I had little idea. In the last 10 minutes, I eliminated the obvious incorrect alternatives and guessed. Eagerly waiting for the scores, which will come in 20 days.

My grandmother expired 13 days ago. My mother told me to have my hair cut "as short as I wished". I am an atheist. Had my mother asked to shave my head off, I might have refused. But not this. I did shave off my head.

(One of the) Biggest Kela of my life

Today, I went to the city(Trichy) to give my TOEFL exam. I was there an hour prior to the Reporting time. Had a look at the Test center. I hadnt had my lunch, so I went to a nearby hotel Banana Leaf, gave order and sat. For one last time, I went over the Confirmation Letter. I saw everything was right : the Test center, time, but ..
But the test date was wrong. It was Oct 21. (three days ago). I couldn't believe what my eyes were seeing. I had erred and that too on the wrong side of the test date. I canceled my order, and took the first bus back to the college.

So now, I have to get a new date : Nov 2. (My AGRE is on Nov 3, definitely). I have been deciding important events in my life by tossing coins (whether to take third year advanced classes or not of DS and Algos course). Have been more into taking the classes, making random permutations of serial numbers to ask questions in that order, etc.

It seems I put my life on Auto-pilot. Its time I took control over my life. I am not taking any classes now. Booking a new date of TOEFL and studying really hard for AGRE.

Burstmode

I always tend to work in burst mode. There are long periods when I do nothing interspersed with short bursts of intense activity. I finish any sitcom, watching 15+ episodes on the trot everyday till all episodes available are seen.

This time, I started (and soon finished) with Smallville. The character I liked the most is Lex Luthor (played by Michael Rosenbaum). He is very witty and sarcastic (bald, on extreme right in the image). His dialogs are exceptional.

After finishing all Smallville episodes, I saw Sweet November, and to my pleasant surprise, recognized Michael Rosenbaum in it too.


I yearn to do research, but the burst mode might not work well with it. Started some preparation of AGRE which I am writing on Nov 3. Payed a visit to the library after months.

Donkey and the Carrot(s)

Ok, let me first of all accept that the title of this blog has been flicked from here, blogged by my good friend (senior) Manas. So, even though I have finished my General GRE test, theres always the next carrot awaiting.

Registered for TOEFL on Oct 21, and GRE Subjective on Nov 3. Had a nice conversation with HT Maam. So I am all set up for applying to the top US Universities.

I was really touched by a mention of the 5 stages of grief in House MD, Scrubs and Grey's Anatomy, some of the TV Series I have been whiling my time :
The stages are:

1. Denial: The initial stage: "It can't be happening." (It can't be true)
   
2. Anger: "Why ME? It's not fair?!" (either referring to God, oneself, or anybody perceived, rightly or wrongly, as "responsible")
3. Bargaining: "Just let me live to see my son graduate." (Let me have one last talk)
   
4. Depression: "I'm so sad, why bother with anything?"
5. Acceptance: "It's going to be OK."
   

I am glad that I have reached the acceptance stage finally.

Truth, Love and Duty

This is the motto of my alma mater, Sacred Heart Convent School.

I was in the choir group, and I knew a lot of prayers. I had lots of heated arguments with almost all my teachers about the irrationality behind the existence of God.

I was a very introvert guy in the school. Sagar Gaikwad was my bestest friend. And we dint want anyone else. (P.S: I am not gay, dudes). School life is always cherishable. Waking up early in the morning (5:30 am), cycling to school, morning extra classes, prefects, class monitors, sharing tiffins, not accosting girls, singing in choir, english elocution, debate, unit tests and term examinations, being Roll of Honour (topping in school), minding primary school kids, playing basketball and football without any rules, painting, homework, studying, assembly, dramas, Gold House Day, ...

I am reminded of a prayer :

"Lord grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can, and
the wisdom to know the difference."

GREat Relief

Finally, my GRE is over. I got a score of 1400 (800q + 600v).

The verbal questions were pretty bad. Got a 110 line RC at 11-12th question.

Some words I remember are downplay, charade, surreptious, sanguine.

The antonyms and SC options were pretty close in meaning, and sometimes ambiguous.See the community http://www.orkut.com/Community.aspx?cmm=170660 for more updates.

GRE tomorrow

My tryst with destiny is tomorrow at 1 pm. Yesterday night, I went to octa, to check out new threads for verbal, and I met Prasanna. He suggested that I stay at his home in Chennai.

So here I am, blogging from his comp. I really owe this to him. His bro and parents' hospitality makes me feel absolutely at home.

Everyone has been wishing me luck, left right and center. Felt really great to get best wishes from all my orkut mentors and co-mentors.

Tomorrow is the day. I dream of getting the perfect 1600, and at the same time, fear I will get a low score around 1200. I should get something in between the two : around 1400 will be fine. But come what may, I am not going down without a fight. GRE, here I come...

Frustrations and Joys of Research

Here is an interesting excerpt from a pdf I found on Carnegie Mellon University website.

"Research can be very rewarding and very frustrating. Most students describe graduate school as a roller-coaster with tremendous highs and tremendous lows.
Frustrations can come from not being able to solve a problem that you’re working on, or from having someone else beat you to the solution. Frustrations can come from loneliness. However, probably the biggest frustration is the realization that you’re not as great as you thought you were.

Here’s a very typical story:
Student X comes from famous school Y in country Z, where he was ranked 5th out of over hundreds of thousands of students. He was also ranked #1 in his class for the year in terms of GPA. The student comes to graduate school expecting to be the best and starts working very hard on research. By the end of his first or second year, the student realizes that he has not yet published any papers. His friends and family from home start asking what’s wrong with him. He feels frustrated and ashamed. He blames his advisor, he blames his department, he blames his school. Finally, he grows up and accepts the fact that maybe he’s not the best, but he can still do well if he works hard. He starts listening better, works harder, and ends up quite successful.

For all the frustrations, research can be extremely joyous. For some people, the joy of research is the joy of discovering something new that no one knew about. You might be discovering a new algorithm, a new operating system design idea, a new idea for maximizing the performance of disk arrays, etc.. For others, there’s the joy of truly understanding. You’ve probably noticed that in classes a professor or book will stop just when things are getting really interesting and say, “the rest is beyond the scope of this class.” In research, you can take a problem as far as you want and understand everything about it. For many, the joy of research comes from being able to make an impact – to change the way systems are built and design them in a smarter way. There’s also the joy of doing it right. In a company, the aim is to get a working product and ship it out quickly. In research, you can take your time and plan out your project so that you are proud to defend every one of your design decisions. Research is not about simple heuristics or quick hacks. Many people also relish the joy of being the authority on an area and of having their work cited by others."

GRE on Sept 3

My GRE is on this Monday. Just finished the cycle tests today. Was dont-care for all the subjects. Experienced the feeling of not being prepared for the cycle tests. Inspite of that, tests were decent.

Talked to Sagar Thakar (3-4 years senior to me, now in IIMB) about what universities I should apply to. Here they are: Stanford, Georgia, Michigan, Texas at Austin, Carnegie Mellon. Will have to research about them...

Watched the movie "Amelie". It was very good.

Inspite of all the workload, never does a day pass by, when I dont think about her.

A.P.J Abdul Kalam for Convo

Saw honorary Abdul Kalam, in person, who came in our college during Convocation. Couldn't get into Barn, where convo was actually held, because you needed to be invited by a person who was graduating that day, or you had to be a girl :(

When you dont want to see/meet a person, you always keep bumping into her... ;) Thats life.

"When a person really desires something all the universe conspires to help that person to realize his dream."

I have accepted the hard facts, and moved on with my life. So now all the romantic, longing songs have been replaced by Lakshya - Title song, and Eminem - I am the way I am.

Had a treat yesterday given by Dongli, Badri and Shishir. Had my first peg (60ml) of Vodka. Had diluted with Pepsi of course. Tasted very bitter, and weird. Decided that wont try it ever again, cos it seems pointless. Retained full control of my mind and body. :P

GRE preparation is decently going on, scoring 800 (Quant) + 550 (Verbal) consistently. Finding it difficult to get above it. Cycle Tests around the corner, but not studying much for them (as if I studied a lot before :P).

I need to get atleast 1400 to aim for any of the top 10 CS universities. Found a nice thought attributed to Einstein:

"Not everything that counts can be counted,
and not everything that can be counted counts."

Delta Nightout

I had a complete night out in Octagon for Delta. This is my way of bidding farewell to delta for 3 weeks till my GRE day. :)

Completed blogs, videos, and changed the template of nitt.edu. Screwed up news. (Rectifying it is left to the juniors as an exercise). Changed the homepage of Delta too.

IBM Technology Day

Yesterday was the IBM Technology Day. I had registered for it, for I did not want to miss anything important, but at the same time, I had this beast of Barrons wordlist over me.

Still, I decided to go for it. It was in A2 hall. The talks were on Multi-core Architecture and Web 2.0. It was mainly for CSE and MCAs, but it was made open to other departments like ECE (why? :( ).

Had a nice chat with one of the IBM guys about the upcoming challenges in Linux and computing in general. During the lecture of Web 2.0, the speaker urged us to implement some of the technologies he was speaking of. I got up and told him about all the things Delta has done like RSS Feedreader, AJAXed student search, wikipedia, books, songs, etc. I also mentioned about "Spider" forums. (I am not sure if I showed off too much).

Then at the end, I gave a lot of ideas that IBM can help our institute with. I have to take a poll on these topics and see what the junta is interested in.

I talked to Sagar and Ramona today. They have been my closest friends. They cheered me up.

I 'm feeling lucky

I finally got an "official" confirmation from Google. I am getting my offer letter today.

GRE Prep has started but not picked up momentum yet. Hope it does. Delta-spider war has began. Delta has a good headstart now. :)

2B v ~2B

I had great confusion whether to sit for Microsoft or not. Given the situation I am in, it was really tough to decide. Kept oscillating, till finally today in the morning, I tossed a coin.

I am not a great believer in fate, destiny, etc. but life has its own way of teaching lessons. So, the final decision I made was, I am not sitting for Microsoft. I know that I am risking my life here, but if I am good enough, I will do well anywhere.

I have realized one thing over the past couple of weeks: I am better being an introvert. I have been trying to break the shackles and change. But my problem is the access specifiers. Even though I have public, protected and private variables, friends have access to all. And my definition of friend happens to be very lenient. I assume that every person is good, by default; which I now realize is not a very good assumption in real life.

I have started my GRE prep now. Currently executing the first pass over the word list. This will mark all the known words, so that I can concentrate on the other words in the second pass. The "Judgement Day" is on Sept 3, just 4 weeks from now. I recently got a 250 GB hard disk, so now I am trying to heap up all the serials and movies I will want to watch after my GRE.

Meanwhile, I have deleted all traces of "her" in my life. All photos, contact no, entry in the kela chart, orkut invite, picasa gallery, blog is gone. My brain is the only place left, it is just a matter of time before it vanishes from there too.

Twist in the tale (tail)

I haven't got the PPO (Pre Placement Offer) from Google yet. The HRs said that I was through the Hiring Committee, but yet to go through the Compensation Committee and signing from Larry Page. This process takes some time, and around 1 out of 1000 applications get rejected after this. The reasons for that being low grades or the committee feeling that we haven't been tested enough.

Microsoft is coming on campus this Monday. So, technically speaking I am eligible to sit for it. But now I am confused, I don't want to mess someone else's chances, and ditch MS for Google (if I get it). Anyways I plan to give GRE and go for higher studies if I get into any of the top 10 universities.

"The most difficult phase of life is not when no one understands you; It is when you don't understand yourself"

Placed in Google

I am finally placed in Google Bangalore :)

Got the news yesterday. I have been having a streak of kelas, so I desperately needed a good news. And this is great.

So, now I am free for GRE preparation. I tried rescheduling it to the end of September but all the dates are taken. I wanted to aim higher and give it my best shot. But I think I can do that even now. I am planning to bunk all the 8:30 am and 1:30 classes from tomorrow to Sept 3, when I write my GRE. I talked to the HOD of our department about attendance problems and he said that it will not be a problem.

In the absolute worst case, I will produce a medical certificate. Though I hope my GRE score card should suffice. ;)

Delta Inductions 2007

After a grueling session of interviews from 10 am in the morning to 3 am at night, we finally selected 16 people into Delta.

My enthusiasm of working in Delta has surged recently. So I scheduled a meeting for the newly inducted very early, i.e: the next day itself.

So today we had our first meeting. I had this ppt to show it to them. I had planned a neat prank. We started with taking the oath of the 10 commandments of Delta, (the 10 was in Octal base because I could only cook up 8). I explained them the hierarchy of the delta team, and then gave them very tough CPC questions alongwith 10 algo questions to solve in 20 minutes. The last question of the paper was to actually write a search engine, including the crawling, indexing, ranking and querying algorithms. Finally, I dropped the bomb that it was all a prank.

Then we had introductions and lots of leg pulling. :)
We gave them Harry Potter themed pamphlets too :P

I had thought of more serious issues to discuss after that, but we ran out of time, so we went to the gate dhaba, where we get tasty (but not very hygienic) food.

Got loads of snaps and videos. Check them out here.

First Week of my Final year

The first week of my final year has been very eventful. It is the only week (as of now) in which I wore a different (Google & Orkut) TShirt and shoes everyday, and bathed everyday.

I got a lot of mixed reactions from people about my dressing sense, some said I had become arrogant, some that I deserved it, some just indifferent.

I have been feeling very moody and vulnerable the whole week.

I was chatting with my friends, sitting on the last bench of the class (which happens rarely). For the first time in my life, I was asked to stand up in the class for talking. The class was of Combinatorics and Graph Theory, taught by Kunwar Singh. He asked me my name, and then he remembered that he had given me S (highest) Grade in both of his subjects previously. He said that he will not give me an S, if I dont solve the problem on the board. I had bunked the previous class, in order to go to the city to repair my computer. I had no clue about the problem. I did the first step, and then he gave me 20 seconds. I could not do the problem. After the class, I went and apologized. Accepted that I hadnt paid attention in the class, and that I wont do it again. But the teacher was pissed off, and said he wont still give an S grade. I said that I dint care about the grades.

Then I have been indirectly told "not interested" by a female, which I thought was my "the one". I feel really sorry for making this so awkward for her. :(

Delta inductions are now going on, on the weekend.

"Every dark cloud has a silver lining"

I hope this one does. I have a lot better things to do in life. I am waiting for my results of Google's PrePlacement Offer. Hope they turn out to be positive.
I am writing GRE on Sept 3. Started with the word list. But I need to shift gears, in order to have a realistic chance.

So the To-do of the next week is:

• Forget about the girl. (Its difficult when you keep remembering that you have to forget about something)
• Start full fledged preparation of GRE.
• Take up the challenge of deserving an S Grade in Combinatorics & Graph Theory. (read start studying).
  

College off to a start

So, I am back here. I have been running away from this for quite some time now. But here I am now.

College has reopened today. But ho! I was back to college 2 weeks ago. I am working on Dalal Street. We have put in our everything. "We" being Sahil Ahuja, my room mate and me. I have the feeling it is going to be great.

The results were out yesterday. I got 9.21, my lowest by far. My first B Grade, and the list goes on. But I am not as disappointed with my results as much I am disappointed with myself. I did not study last semester, nor paid attention in the class, was the among the last to complete and submit assignments, almost had short attendance, got addicted to Counterstrike, watched hell lot of movies, worked for Pragyan.

This semester I want to change all of this. And I am going to change.

"Few people in this world get to do what they would have done for free and get paid for it"

I yearn to be one of those.
And for that I must quit time-passing. And I think, maybe stop working for Pragyan CSG, Delta, etc after Pragyan 06 is over. Because I dont think I can take it any more.