Memories of IIIT-H : Chapter 8

The farewell was the first event where we worked as a team. The idea was initiated by Umesh and every one put their effort to make it successful. But before that there came so many issues that we needed to take into consideration. We had so many meetings regarding different problems that were arising and the best part was the brainstorming in which everyone actively participated.

The first problem that came was about date of event. The semester was ending soon and we didn’t have much holidays remaining on which we could organize this. We had to think about submission dates of our batch and senior batch both. As it was submission time it was not possible to extend date further and after that semester would have been over. Amazon was coming for internship offers on the next day on which we were planning the event. I like everyone else was confused whether it’s a good idea to keep event just before amazon interviews. But then pooja came with a strong determination that we should fix the date and should not worry too much.

Another issue was venue for the event. I along with a few more people was in favor of an outside campus venue. The reason was there were too many restrictions like no music were to be put if we would have organized in campus. So finally it was agreed that it should be organized at some outside place. Rajiv, Raju, Umesh, Abhishek,  Avinash searched for a proper hotel with all facilities and within budget. Finally Rajiv and Raju found the required hotel.

Then we thought about the what all things we can do as part of event. Giving title to seniors was one idea that I knew was nice. Smriti and Abhishek helped me a lot in putting those difficult (and stupid ) rhymings that we gave as title to seniors. Title described every individual’s some personality aspect. Narendra and ravikiran prepared the titles in telagu language. Poushali drew cool caricatures on those title cards. A few more classmates like avanti, ravi, romanch, amitabh, ram also helped in title writing. Pooja and Smriti along with others packed the gifts to be given to seniors.

One more idea that I had seen in my B.E. farewell was to play a background song for each senior when he/she will receive his/her title. Dhiraj was having the responsibility of song collection and others were helping in song selection.

Then romanch and me worked on  one line quizzes that would be asked to seniors and will give them chance to win prizes. Smriti came up with a nice game in which everyone was given a balloon and a needle. Everyone had to save his balloon and prick the others’. The last one surviving was the winner.

We reached hotel in the evening and checked everything was set up. Divakar was also actively involved in coordinating event.Seniors started reaching the place by IST . Divyendu and avinash started the event with their witty anchoring. Then titles were given to seniors in bunch and in between them some games were played too. It was Umesh b’day and presence of everyone made his celebration memorable . Then we all had dinner and then danced for some time.

The event was successful and we were appreciated for nice party. The reason behind success of this event was the team work.  There were few people like Amit who were working behind the scene and helped from start to end. Every one contributed in a way he could. This was a memorable, funny and learning experience for all of us. Now we were ready to face final exams and thus move to third semester.

P.S. : Though I tried to include everyone’s name in the post, who worked in that event; if someone’s name is missing readers (those who know) can reflect on his/her contribution.

Memories of IIIT-H : Chapter 7

The felicity was over and it was time to move ahead in semester. One of the interesting thing in SE course were the presentations. The students were divided into teams of 5 members each . The members in my group were Amit, Abhishek, Keshav, Nitin and myself. We were required to give 2 presentations in a semester. We were given a case study based on certain topic of software enginnering and we had to come up with a presentation along with a role play.

The role plays were the best part. Some unique ideas came from people and were fun to watch. Some of us including me were very bad actors but the important was to get courage to present them inspite of our deficiencies. Narendra along with his team mates presented one of the best role playing in which they showed human evolution and the announcement of  “release”.

Another course DBMS used to have surprises in every test. But the best of them was the end sem. First time in my life I was seeing an objective paper in final exam. That too with a great scoring strategy. Each question had  4 options  and there could be multiple correct answer. Each correct answer could fetch u 6 marks. So in a quesion you could score 24. But the interesting thing was the penalty for wrong answer. For each wrong answer you would get -3. It was also possible that there is no correct option and you were expected to leave that question as it is withou answering. So you could score minimum -12 marks in a question. I could not stop appreciating the marking schme for its surprise element though this had put my end sem marks and hence grades in jeopardy.

Another course was WDKM which had hundreds of research paper to read (O.K. I accept I am exaggerating here, they were around 45). Some of them were very informative on search engine technology. I made a project with ravikant and our main task was to convince our sir that we have done a certain percentage of work at different milestones. This was so because there were three milestones in course and 30, 50 and 100 % work should be completed by each milestone respectively.

Algorithm course didn’t turn out as expected. You need to know a few proofs and few question to get good grades. I was lazy enough to do even that and scored an average grade in the course in the end.

Software Technology was the course that had lot of offering in terms of course content. A lot of technologies were kept in syllabus but ver few covered. The course was like fake pearls which shine but was not worth much. Some of the credit for this also goes to feedback given by students to instructors.

So this was all about the courses in second semester. There were 5 subjects in the semester but still it was lighter than first semester. We could get through without much stress. Between all of this few events were happening like holi which I regret missing in first sem and Sudharma and amol treat to us. But the one event which stood out was farewell to our seniors.

Memories of IIIT-H : Chapter 6

Preparation for felicity had started from the first semester itself but the in last month preparations took a full swing. The organizing team had done a great job. The felicity had lot of things to offer for everyone. It was a three day festival and all types of events as part of it. There were programming contests, technical quizzes, cultural events, guest lectures and lot more. When I saw the 3 days calender I could see a whole bunch of interesting things to participate.

I saw some cool events like Radio Jockey performance, antakshari, rangoli making, poster making and not to forget computer gaming competitions like NFS and FIFA. The first day had a celebrity performance in evening and the celebrity was Indian Ocean Band. The band is famous for song “are ruk ja re bande” from black friday n some other songs. Though the band was very good but they were not able to keep the crowd glued to their seats. But this was the first time I was watching a live performance by a celebrity in college, so it was a nice experience.

The second day had similar events like day one in the afternoon. In the evening there was a rock show. I didn’t had any knowledge of rock so I didn’t get exactly what was going on. The only music I understood was performances from students of our college. For other bands from outside, someone was shouting in full volume on stage.

The felicity played a great role in making the bonding strong with many friends. We were slowly forming a friend circle which was not just made of class mates but who were friends. This one was indeed becoming a very large group. Also this was the time when  our two seniors Amol and Sudharma were transforming  into ‘Amol bhai’ and ‘Sudharma bhai’. I also had more conversation with my first international friend azli who in coming months became one of the best friends I made at IIIT-H

Coming back to felicity the third and final day was most happening. It had two most important events named Mr. and Ms. Felicity and War of DJs. This was the most entertaining evening at IIIT-H for me so far. We were sitting in front row and were dancing in between performances on stage.

The performances from crowd were much more than on stage itself. People were standing on chair and dancing. This was the day when I came out of my shell n my shyness. I myself danced on a table and chair along with my friends. We all danced till the last beat of DJ. That DJ night really rocked.

After the DJ night we started roaming around in campus. I remember the funny pics we took everywhere in campus. There were many ropes hanging from the trees and many people took their suicidal photos that day. Only people who were there that day can understand it . After that we had a chat session and finally the felicity was over.

Memories of IIIT-H : Chapter 5

The second semester had started and I thought of improving my CGPA in this semester. Some of the seniors had warned me that a bad CGPA would affect ur placements. I decided to work had in this semester and this determination  lasted for one week.

In first week, main discussion topic for all of us was to choose elective course. After all the discussions, I decided to take WDKM course. This was the course where I learnt how to sleep with open eyes. The other courses we had taken were software tech., Software engg., DBMS and Algorithm . I wrote down all the course name here  just to check that whether I remember all the course names and it took me around 20 seconds to recall the last course name

In first class of DBMS, Dr. Kamal sir made a movie like entry. I was sitting somewhere in middle of class and we were all chatting with each other. I didn’t know he was sitting in class. Suddenly I heard his voice from mike and I looked around to find him. I saw him coming from back side, moving towards black board with a laptop ( I don’t know the device name, it’s a laptop with a touch screen and is used with a pen device)  in his hand. This was the best entry by any professor in his first class I had seen so far.

Software engg. course started with a promising note to teach the subject in a different way. The course had two presentations in its content. One thing I liked about IIIT-H marking policy was marks distribution for any course. Whatever u do in any course whether its an assignment, a project work, mid sems and endsem had their share of weightage. The benefit was even if u perform poor in some section due to some reason, u get chance to survive. One bad day will not ruin ur course grade and u can get a descent grade if not an  A.

Then there was Makar Sankranti celebration on 14th January. This was the first festival that I celebrated in campus. We were provided kites and Umesh brought kites from outside too. It was a treat to watch a ground full of people flying kites. This reminded us of our childhood when we used to fly kites throughout the day. It was a joyous day and we enjoyed it thoroughly. But this was just beginning and there were more festivals to come and the biggest festival at IIIT-H named ‘FELICITY’ was a few steps away.

Memories of IIIT-H : Chapeter 4

I was fed up with the same routine and sitting in front of computers all the time. So I started going to gym with enthusiasm which lasted for few days as expected . The one benefit I got was I used to have chat sessions with nitin after gym and thus brought some light moments for both of us in those busy days.

I was allotted room on the third floor and as I was lazy enough, I seldom used to go to lab. We were sharing the systems but this was never a reason for not going. Sometimes when I got very bored from working at room, I used to go to lab and saw it full all the time. Our PG-1 lab didn’t have a working A.C. and used to be very hot because of heat generated by system and mosquitoes had a party every night. The people who used to work there should be appriciated for the hard work they had put in to work there in such extreme conditions.

Umesh and Ram used to play Age of Empires in the late night along with the assignment work. They were the people who injected gaming virus in all of us I suppose. It was nice to see they were very cool about the work when others were pulling their hair apart while thinking about solutions.

One great thing about IIIT-H was that it was a happening place all the time. You can see people on IIIT-H roads all the time whether it is morning, evening, 10 O’ clock in night or 3 A.M. To make life easier coffee machines were installed in the hostels.

One more guy whom I met in my class was Abhishek through Amit as far as I remember. From that point onwards he was part of every memory that I had at IIIT-H. I was working with Amit and Abhishek on all the assignments in all subjects be it IT workshop, discrete mathematics n computer system. The names of other three subjects appeared so late in the posts because all the time we used to spent on APS.

This way, the first semester was over. Despite of all the hard work, I didn’t had a high CGPA as I got screwed in one subject and had a C- against it. But I could say it was a descent start considering the things I had to learn. Till this point things had been a bit miserable. A very busy schedule, tasteless food at OBH mess, not much fun, no events everything was not going in a comfortable way. I was enjoying but couldn’t say to fullest. But this was only one side of colored cube of IIIT-H life . The other faces of cube had lots of fun in it which were to begin from next semester.

Memories of IIIT-H : Chapter 3

The portal had three functionality in it. It showed the current assignment questions. It had an uploader from where we could submit the solution to problems. Along with these it had an evaluator which ran our programs on different test cases and displayed the marks. It was like a game where u keep on scoring the points depending on how u perform at a particular level.

So I had assignment 0 in front of me and by seeing the questions I asked myself , ” if this is considered 0 level then I haven’t done any programming till date “. It took me a lot of time to solve them and get a descent score. But it was fun indeed. Getting the marks on the spot was nice to see. Moreover there was no human involvement in evaluation which was a new thing for me too.Moreover there was a cheat checker too which can compare two codes and give the similarity in their structures.

I was finding this course very heavy. There were two labs in a week where we were given two questions and expected to submit same day by midnight. Now I came to know what is a deadline . The assignment was also time consuming as we were not able to think about variuos test cases. This was affecting other courses too because we were not getting any time for them.

Our routine had become very hectic. On some days I was taking 4 hours sleep. The reason was my inefficiency in solving questions. I was taking almost double time for solving a particular problem as compared to others.  We were sleeping late and had classes at morning 8. We used to attend lecture with half open eyes full of sleep. I knew this hard work would be useful in future, but at that time it was looking troublesome.

One more thing that used to bother me were the lab sessions. We were expected to code in the lab itself at first, though we were given deadlines till 12. There were some great thinkers ( and coders )  like Romanch, Dhiraj, Pooja etc. and few Part time M.Tech  students who used to solve questions in the lab itself when I struggled to even understand the question. Same story continued in lab tests also.

But one good thing that happened with me was that I never got frustrated though I was struggling. I think that helped me a lot not only in course but in future too. I was learning slowly and gaining confidence. I learnt to go at my own pace without being affected by my current condition . This was turning out to be one of top 5 things learnt at IIIT-H. Thus, I was sailing through my first semester smoothly.

Memories of IIIT-H : Chapter 2

My college life had begun again and this time it was completely different. Amit was my first  friend in IIIT-H and he helped me from day 1 to last day. It was day of registration for courses. We were roaming in the main building, searching for course codes, filled up the forms and were ready to start with semester – 1.

Then we took the responsibility of lab system allotment and were setting up the lab. This was a novel experience for me as I never got opportunity and responsibility of lab ourselves. I remember I met Dhiraj first time in the lab itself. We were facing problems in setting up network in linux. I did not have much experience in linux and this guy was opening terminal in front of me and typing a series of commands.  Using “Service Network Restart” command was a big thing for me and I was looking at him as he was a very fundu guy ( He is but not because he knows this command but the great knowledge he has about everything about computers )

I was thinking that it would be very difficult for me to survive here. Slowly I was getting used to everything and I was highly impressed the way technology was used in everything. I was so excited to see these things that I used to tell about them to my friends outside IIIT-H all the time.

When you see computers  used in such a great way everywhere you get a feel that you are studying in one of the best institute in India for computer science students. When I first saw the mess portal, I could not stop appreciating the idea. I never imagined that mess bills can be managed in such a nice way. Every student is given an account where one can choose in which mess he want to eat on a particular day; one can see his current mess billing and one can cancel meals.

Then I came across library portal where we get all information about any book in library and check its availability. Intranet pages had all the information about all the courses. We had mailing list for every course and were supposed to get all the notifications about subjects and classes through mails.I know these are normal things for IIIT-H students but I was witnessing them for the first time.

Meanwhile I was meeting new classmates and  learning the way IIIT-H system works. We were given a welcome party in first weekend by seniors. There was no concept of ragging and we had a friendly interaction with our seniors.

I heard we will be getting all our assignments through mails for every subject. Teaching assistants was also a new concept for me. But I still could not sense the storm that was coming up from a distance. I could not sense that this thing will make my life hell for next 4-5 months. Finally the disaster had come and we received a mail saying , ” APS portal is up “

Memories of IIIT-H : Chapter 1

This was the third time I was coming to Hyderabad. The first time was when I came with my family and second time for my written exam. This time I was welcomed by a heavy rain. It was raining so heavily that I got wet even inside auto rikshaw. There was a strong wind blowing along with the rain that made rain coming inside auto.

When I reached college I was completely wet. I caught up with fever by night and was thinking whether I would be ready for interview next day. Luckily I was fine next day and was ready for my interview.

I reached main building and met Meghna who was looking more nervous than me. Then she introduced me to Ritesh sir who was her guide and coincidentally my senior. He graduated from the SGSITS Indore, the same college from where I did my engineering. He gave me a few interview tips and asked me a few questions like a mock interview. At that moment I didn’t realize that I was meeting a person whom I would be respecting so much in coming days.

After some time my turn had come. It was 20 minutes before lunch time and that me doubtful whether this can go against me. The panel might rush through my interview to have their lunch on time. With all those doubts in my mind I opened the gate of interview room.

I saw a panel of six professors sitting in front of me. I entered the room, hiding my nervousness and took a seat. I was wondering why six people are needed when one is enough to scare me. I was expecting bouncers from all sides and was thinking how to duck them. I forwarded my final year project report to one of the profesor and was expecting some questions from it.

He destoryed my first plan by putting aside that report. Then professor in front of me asked 2-3 questions from operating systems that I was able to answer. I gained some confidence and thought interview is going quite well.

If everything goes the way u thought then there would be no fun in life. The next question I was asked about working of dual core processor. I din’t have a clue about it and decided to accept it. The same trend continued for next 3-4 questions. The questions were framed so that I couldn’t even guess and had to say “sorry sir” every time. This was the story for initial 5 minutes.

The next question I was asked was, ” Why don’t you go for MS ? ” and after that entire interview revolved around this question. I gave all the replies that I could think of and excuses that I had heard from others. Finally after some more questions interview was over and I know I had performed very badly.

I came back home and started preparing myself for my job. I didn’t expect my selection at all. I was in Indore that day when Meghna called me and said, ” You are selected”. I could not believe and tears came out of my eyes. I had fullfilled my father’s dream.

My parents decided to come with me. I was against this as I thought it was not needed  but later on realized that they want to wish me luck from the place itself. After settling everything they left  for my hometown on Sunday. Next day, 9th july, Monday I was getting ready for my journey to start.

Memories of IIIT-H : Chapter 0

I was on my way to Hyderabad for the written exam someday in May. I am very bad in remembering dates ( read only dates not ‘the dates’). My sister Meghna who is also studying in IIIT-H, had informed me that her four  friends were also going to Hyderabad by same train. So I joined them in their coach once ticket checker had checked my ticket. I met Swati, Raina and Prashasti for the first time who later on became my sis cum friends . We were playing antakshari (See songs were with me always inside or outside IIIT-H) and it was near about 9 in the evening.

I remember Raina got a call from her home and was informed that bomb blasts have taken place in Hyderabad. I heard this news with a shock after all I did not expect such a welcome in Hyderabad. We all were worried whether we will be able to reach college as it was around 20 km from the station.

Luckily the news had not spread and we got conveyance to our college. I think the time was nearly midnight. We went to canteen, had our very late dinner and then I went to bed.

Next morning I started for venue for test which was Osmania university along with three other candidates named Umesh, Amit and Akshya. We took  the entrance exam and as usual discussed about the paper. Though I performed much better than I expected but still did not expect to clear it seeing the large competition.

I was in Ujjain and was driving my Honda Activa along with my friend when I got a call from Meghna. I had cleared the paper and the immediate reaction I had was something like this , “How ? How did it happen?”. This was a pleasant surprise and I could sense my life taking a different route. The reason was I had an interview on 22nd june, the results were to be declared on 27 th june and if I clear it , I would be joining the college from 8th july. The date of joining for my job was 4th july in pune. So 27th june was the date that was going to decide my fate. Now I was looking forward to my interview.

Memories of IIIT-H : Preface

When I joined International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad ( IIIT-H ), I never imagined at that time, I would miss this place so much. But now after two years I can say that I have spent the most wonderful years of my life at this place. IIIT-H has given me everything that I could expect and in fact I have got more than my expectations.

I am really grateful to  my sister and my dad because they wanted me to get admission here. I must admit I was not much excited to come here. There were two reasons for that. One was, I had a job in hand after completing my B.E. and was looking forward for working. Secondly initially I didn’t believe I would be able to get in. But after clearing the written exam I knew I had some chance though not much sure.

My last two years and coming years would have been completely different if I were not going for my M.Tech. I met some great people, made some great friends, learnt some great things and had lots of great moments. So I thought of compiling all these nice moments together in my posts as a series.

I thank each and every person at IIIT-H ranging from professors, teaching staff, admin people, coffee shop owner, canteen and juice shop guys, the shopkeeper, security guards, hostel staff, room cleaners and many more I am not able to recall, who helped me in this great voyage. But above all of them I thank all my friends at IIIT-H who made my stay so wonderful and unforgettable here.