JAVA is a language I know very little!! Still it has not been that much of a problem to be a lab TA of a first course on JAVA programming but the weekly duty of 3 hours used to be quite tiresome.
The guy was not ready to accept that it is highly unlikely that anything is wrong with the extensibly tried, tested and used commercial compiler inbuilt in LINUX. It was shortly discovered that a stray semi-colon was causing all the trouble.
I had been given a different job initially. I was supposed to help the instructor in designing assignment problems. This is an institute level course and is compulsory for all UG freshers of IIT Kanpur.
The instructor is a young professor who seems to be extremely sincere in teaching the new students the basics of programming. Unfortunately I could not do justice to the job I was initially assigned. I was subsequently moved to the lab. Though sir told me " I want you to be in the lab as some lab TAs are expressing their interests in participating in problem designing..I want to give them a chance"...I strongly believe the main cause was my unsatisfactory performance. A very decent sober man that he is, prof. Baswana did not tell me anything on my face. Anyway, I liked my later job much much more!!
In course of my few months' stay at IIT, I have found the institute remarkably different from the university I graduated from. One very pleasing observation has been that, most of the teachers seem to be least bothered about CPI/marks/grades, etc. Unlike JU most of them really have the mind to teach. so I found the academic culture very different. naturally B.Tech final year and dual degree students are as expected much more competent than most of us. Bright chaps that they are( the cutoff for admission in our department is typically an all India rank better than 100 in IITJEE), they are groomed into complete enginners in 4 years.
Also I found all the staffs of IIT, taken from the bhaiyas serving food in mess to the people in different administrative offices, very much dedicated to their jobs. My experience has so far been very different and very bitter...as in JU I was used to receiving very hostile kind of response from staffs most of the times. A few days back the sweeper of our wing of the hostel( The 4th hall of residence!! I have been told by seniors that this hostel of IIT Kanpur is of great historical importance!!) on his own offered me to carry out an "intensive clean-up operation" in my room( it became very much necessary although..) , something really hard to imagine in any other place.
Despite many fond attributes of this place, the first semester has been very very painful for me. I doubt whether anybody can even imagine a more burdened course structure than ours!!
Dr. Sanjeev Saxena was the instructor of the advanced data structures and algorithms course. The course mostly contained data structures which have been designed keeping amortization in mind. We have been taught Fibonacci heaps, Splay trees, Union Find data structures. I found these things highly involved, extremely complicated, and the purpose of so much of complications was not very readily comprehensible(at least to me). So it was somewhat discouraging. Also given the volume of topics the instructor ran through, we were not in a position to put in a lot of effort in understanding these things in reasonable details, although we had no shortage of reading materials including research papers introducing these concepts. So I ended up having a partial and very sketchy knowledge on these things.
Things were on similar notes in other courses also. cs618 was a graduate course on searching and indexing techniques in databases that I registered for. But had I known how the course would be like, I wouldn't have thought of registering!!! I doubt whether the teacher at all left out any indexing data structure discovered till date!! Most of them being trees of very peculiar and annoying names: k-d-b tree, R-tree, R* tree, R+ tree, M tree, X tree to name a few. Adding to that were extremely heavy implementation assignments and a course project. I didn't think I would complete the course and would get a decent enough grade at the end. But I found the course disgusting...you study a lot of things, all in a superficial outlinish manner. But there might be something wrong with me, as there is a good interest in databases in IITK CSE and there are reasons to believe that prof. Anab Bhattacharya(instructor of cs618) has to some extent served to arouse that interest. Prof. Bhattacharya is a graduate from JU( after that a phd from University of California at Santa Barbara...but why the hell did he return!! he could have stayed there!!) but I hope that all JU BE's are not as disgusting!
I got a zero in second mid semester examination in Quantum Computation. Though quite a few students, including some btech 4th year students, also got zero..yet getting a zero is not a matter to take pride in! I took up this course with a lot of hope(the name sounded interesting), but the course has let me down. The instructor Dr. Piyush Kurur speaks some hindi despite being a (probably) Keralite( Though my hindi is poor, it's supposedly better than the Hyderabadi hindi that the Andhra guys out here speak. But one Tamil batchmate of mine seems to be completely ignorant of Hindi. Same seems to the case with a Keralite though his btech is from NIT Calicat, a well-known national technical college. Now I am trying to invent a thumb rule for the highly confusing gender thing!!). He is also a fresh phd from Institute of Mathematical sciences, Chennai. He told me all is required for the course is some elementary linear algebra and some mathematical maturity. But this seemingly humble pre-requisite seemed to pose a very alarming barrier(Some examples can make it clearer: "Today I am going to talk about the basic differences between classical and quantum information theory" I did not take any course on information theory in my BE..he didnt even care to ask. Or "Don't you know Chinese Remainder Theorem?I suppose it has been covered in your course on discrete mathematics. I myself taught the course..how could I have left it out?" forgetting completely that among his students are some who did not graduate from this institute). Anybody would pity me knowing that I failed to understand most of the questions in the mid semester examination, not to speak of answering them! Though I worked hard in last month, did reasonably in end sem exams, and is hoping to get a B if not an A, I myself know I have gained almost nothing from the course.
Datastreaming algorithm is a course I might say I did more or less well in. Dr Sumit Ganguly taught the course. I liked it..it indroduced a new model of computation, it's purposes, difficulties and objectives. It also gave me a feel of randomized algortihms, what it means to say that an algorithm has probabilistic performance guarantees. I also saw some really nice proofs of lower bounds of space complexities of some problems based on excellent information theoretic arguments or reduction from a known hard problem. Also we learnt some new and really delightful methods for solving probability problems and computing expectations of random variables but however one can say one is supposed to learn these in a first course on probability theory. But I could'nt put in much effort due to loads imposed by other courses. Nevertheless, it might not be a lie to say that I have gained something from this course.
So this, in short, is how my start off in the new place has been like. I am looking forward to go home in the winter holidays in a few days!! Tralalalalala!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
