Personal 2010 in Review

2010 has been kind of a special year of joy and happiness and at the same time, an year filled with some mistakes paving way to my slow learning curve. It started out with a high flying midnight rush to release the saarang 2010 portal amidst the jamming network for the new year wishes. It ends with a peaceful quiet day(hopefully one that does not involve a server crash in the midnight). An year where I returned back to my old studious ways and shutting out extravagances, yet achieving some small things along the way that should keep me away from disheartening.

First four months and a new semester and a challenge to restore my credibility after a woeful performance and till date the toughest time endured in the third sem had to end. The bitter cold did not make things easy at the start but once I settled in, things heated up and I was raring to go. First there was Saarang which was enjoyable as usual with shankar's rocking performance at the popular nite being the highlight. Then there had to be some spark that leads people to destiny and mine came in the form of a huge invite to manage the insti site, an honour and later would prove to be a great menace at times. Acads seemed to drool along at its own pace, with the exception of CO which was terrible to the extent that it drew me away from listening and paying any attention. That made me realise that however much you try to sit in a class there had to be some inspiration from the other side and eventually all my other electives would turn out to be so.
The last quarter of the semester came the big hype for a shaastra coordship. My friend SaiG became the core, a post he richly deserves for his knowledge of the web and gave me a shot at becoming the shaastra coord. After a drilling interview, the results were a big cheer and I became the possessor of 3 major student accessible server to the insti which was quite special considering from where i started less than a year ago due to the same man, saig's advice. I had a chance to work on a new dimension to my web scripting knowledge and embarked upon the Django journey with another friend being my super-coord and two juniors who did take a lot of burden from me. Learning python initially and then Django and then some really arduous work trying to link from Django to PHP. But when it all unfolded the work was pretty awesome.
There had to be a disappointment and a low in the year and mine had to come in the dead center of the year during the summer. My limited exposure to script a successful career path may have taken a hit here when I tried my hand at a project, rather than getting an intern and taking the monkey off my back like all my other friends. Little did I realize that a student in his second year without any special previous experience in many field can conjure something that is breath taking display of research. Thus after failure to come up with something worthwhile for the project after reading bunch of research papers which lead to another bunch, my desire to research may have taken a hit, but thanks to the very same prof a semester later to prove me wrong and ending my year on an all-time high. Summer meanwhile coincided with the World Cup and team Germany richly rewarded me with beautiful football for supporting them for two WC's in a row for them. My pick for the two best matches had to be Germany v/s Argentina/England and Netherlands v/s Brazil although Uruguay v/s Ghana was also awesome.
Summer ended and a new leaf begun where I shun away more things that came my way to lead a peaceful life after being mentally tired in the summer. Personal attention was the key and sat down to plan my road map for the semester and beyond and signed up for GRE classes which proved a very hectic scheduled weekends. 3rd year had to be tough and it was unusually free for the first 3 months with atleast a slot free in every week for the first 1.5 months. But the calm before the storm is one heck of a saying because when 5th sem hit its peak, I was left congratulating my bold decision to take out AI as my elective course and suffer the wrath that my fellow students faced. My first blog post a reminder of who I was, put to shame by my bold decision to take PCA, which I went on to realise was more of an M.Tech level course and that I had no right in taking it and yet coming out in trumps augured well for my future.
Between all this came the fight for the interns which was more pivotal due to my shambolic summer. Due to god's grace my intern hunt never really exceeded beyond the first 2 companies, ironically both being an involuntary decisions made by a close friend and a desperate IR hounding on anyone remotely in CS. First phone interview was pathetic realisation of under-preparation. The two days of hard work digging my rather cryptic writing in the graph theory and automata notebooks was left bothering me. But the other field of interview has left me to research a new horizon that I hope to explore in the coming year. But true to the words of some fellow who told me 'When you dont try and get a reward, you grab with both hands'. My MS-IDC written round was so bad that my initial reaction with a close reaction was to proceed with an impending assignment instead of drowning on this one. That I spent hours with my assignment and deciding to watch a movie at 1 in the night that ended at 3 lays testimony to the bizzare events that unfolded on the glorious sunday. Even more so because of my initial apprehension of attending their placement talk and after being convinced half-heartedly it seems a fairy tale looking back now. Surviving not 1 but 3 interviews with a hot and extremely good algo man praha and pipping him out in the end will be forever etched in my memory and my moment of the year 2010.
Continuing my story of the 5th semester which faded out with controversies in the dept and coming untouched was relief. But the insti server decided that it was time it showed its true colours after just a day of releasing the grades. The migration takes huge amount of patience as we found out and after hurdles of all kind restoring it back in 10 days was special effort with all the people involved in the process. Technically my semester got over yesterday with my course project extending to the winter. The first hand experience in research was special and the numerous research of the simulator and some pretty hard debugging in the lab accompanied with a bunch of seniors whom we didnt know, yet they were always there with something to talk about, was somewhat special adding my endurance tag in my kitty. Finally the year had to come to its fag end and some time with family, friends and most importantly God with some pilgrimage trips flags off this year in style apart from my spectacular acad rewards. Hope 2011 can conjure something that is even more special.