Friday, September 12, 2008

Life's Good here...

Finally, I get some time to write something. Life on the busy lane has started for me, with classes on four days of the week, from Monday to Thursday and part-time job and Seminars taking over Friday and the weekend. I do not have any day which is completely free and I am surprisingly not unhappy about it. I guess with the weather getting colder by the day I do not wish to venture out and see the tourist locations on offer in the North East.

After the initial homesickness and loneliness life now feels very good. I guess one of the main reasons is the fact that I am enjoying my courses and class work. The teaching here is very good and more than how well they teach in class, their ability to make you work towards deadlines in the form of assignments and homeworks gives the additional push required to make you learn the subject well. Only now do I understand how all the toppers, Fundoos and so called Padips(Nerds) felt while being good at what they did best. It is actually a great feeling to learn on your own and do the assignments for the following class.

In my Statistics course, I am proud to say I am among the students who understand the subject well and do the assignments with relative ease. To my surprise, well actually to me shocking surprise, people here are using even my solutions and guidance to complete their assignments and to prepare for the weekly quizzes in class. A feeling that cannot be easily explained takes over when such a thing happens. It was not so long back that I, as a student of NIT, Trichy, used to rely upon others for the assignment and not care one bit about doing even a little part of it on my own. We used the few hours just before submission deadline to copy down from the people who had spent a night or two completing it. Sometimes we even managed to persuade the teacher to postpone the submission date for the simple reason that we had been lazy enough to not even copy the assignments.

Well, coming from that system I choose to look at the situation here in the US as a welcome change, because the primary reason I am here for is to study. Only while doing these courses do we people in the India also realise how monotonous our system in India is. Even mathematics was a subject which was made theoretical by the teaching methods and there was no effort taken to make the students develop an interest in the subject. If such a thing had been established in our system then I could have probably waived off an entire Statistics course here and taken up another course of my choice. But, the fact that I did not put in a complete effort during my under-grduation in this course has led me to take up the course and learn it properly on this occasion.

As for my part-time job, well I finally have permanent shifts at a Dining hall( The US version of our Indian college Mess) and my job involves handling anything and everything that people eat. Being a vegetarian, I initially expected that it would not be a comfortable and pleasant experience, but the fact that we handle all the stuff using gloves and also that all the food is processed and refrigerated, nullifies any odour the food stuff may have. On the whole I have no qualms about my work apart from that it does take up my weekend and also that it is a tiring job. Working in the salad bar can be fun, as some of my friends working in other universities' dining halls will agree, because it involves cutting nice fruits and vegetables and since the work involves all fresh items, the job in itself feels fresh.

Well, I have my dining hall shift starting in half an hour. Though its only a 5 minute walk from the library I am in, I will be going early so as to avail the luxury of enjoying free food in the dining hall. It is a tricky proposition because we need to figure out which stuff is vegetarian and which is not. That is what takes a while. :)