Recap....

Its been more than 5 months since I wrote stuff here...and I know its been too long, I shud have come here earlier, but sometimes things dont necessarily work out the way you want them to....anyways, i'm back and thts what matters for now i guess :)

The last 5 months have been just fab! Right from packing for 2 years, which was an amusingly monumental task, to saying goodbye to loved ones, which was surprisingly not as hard as I had imagined, maybe because I was better prepared, to flying across the globe to a totally new and unseen place on my own, to finding my feet in one of the awesomest places on earth, to getting thru a bitter-sweet, whirlwind first quarter, laced with more lows (all academic, none personal or social :) ) than I had had in life till then, to the fantastic vacation, where I ensured there's not many places I'm yet to see in this part of the US :) , to a rollicking second quarter which is already halfway through, phew! Its been quite a journey! I wouldnt want to bore people with a detailed account of these months, but still, there's quite a few snippets worth sharing...So here goes...

1. The Half Wave Rectifier
One of my first memories of the place is the EE dept orientation, especially the end of the Chair's welcome speech. After he had finished welcoming us and wishing us all the best for the upcoming wonderful years of our life, Prof. Horowitz asked the besotted, bedazzled crowd a seemingly simple question...

Whats this?
I thought "Great!! The quarter's not even begun and Profs have started pestering us with questions, albeit ridiculously simple!"

"Half wave rectifier!", the whole class answered in chorus.

"Correct! Now tell me what happens if the breakdown voltage of the diode is lesser than the input voltage? How do you ensure the diode stays alive?"

"You add another diode in series!", pat came the reply from the class!

"Very good! What if their combined voltage isn't enough to withstand the input?"

"You add another diode in series!"

This was getting ridiculous! Just as I was about to form a really bad impression of this whole place, Prof. Horowitz said

"Now students, like this sine wave, you all will have lots of ups and downs at Stanford. What matters is how you can keep the highs and get rid of the lows, just like this half-wave rectifier! What do you need for that? Like you all said, diodes! Who are these diodes??"

There was perfect silence in the room full of 200 people! This wasnt a technical question and hence nobody was willing to venture a guess :) Everyone was eager to hear what was coming next!

"Look around the room....Its full of diodes....like you! How much you like your time at Stanford depends on how many friends you make....the more diodes there are in your circuit, the happier you will be in this wonderful place!"

People couldnt stop beaming at that statement! :) Prof. Horowitz himself could barely stifle his smile :)

2. In retrospect...

Dec 11...The day I felt like a huge load was off my shoulders! Last day of my first quarter at Stanford! A hectic 12 weeks later, I was lower on confidence than I had begun but that was more because of lack of mental preparedness than anything else. For one thing, I hadnt studied much for the past 2 years, and for another, I hadnt expected Computer Networks to be a difficult course after taking it once at COEP and after working in the domain for 2 years! Guess what, it was the toughest of the lot! Believe it or not, I came pretty close to flunking the class, but in the end managed decently well. AI turned out to be the savior of the quarter for me. What networks took away, AI supplied in plenty - confidence of being able to work on something totally alien but totally awesome! Now as a I look back, I cant believe I have already programmed a robotic dog to cross the most difficult of terrains, written a handwritten digit recognizer, written maze games and puzzles, encoded a whole static router, encoded a whole dynamic router, implemented NAT, unsuccessfully written TCP reliable layer, programmed robots called Romeo and Juliet to find each other after they are lost in Gates(CS dept building) and yet attended almost every home game, most of the parties, and managed to stay alive, with a semblance of sanity still intact! :)

Life at Stanford isnt as much about time management or workload management, as it is about managing and controlling the fears within you! What a Masters degree teaches you here is more relevant than what the Professors teach in class or what you teach yourself during assignments, and that is recognizing your strengths and weaknesses, and playing to your strengths while trying to convert the weaknesses to strengths! The awareness of this is primarily the reason why my second quarter has been so fun-filled and rollicking! :)

3. A superb vacation!
December was so much fun after the exams! A couple of laidback days and i was off to LA to meet Niks and Ravi. Dhav had a lil surprise in store for us and before we knew it, we were in Vegas! After seeing "most" of Vegas and LA, Stanford was the next stop, where Gou joined the party and in the process, added another dimension to the gang! Ksh's entry was the quintessential icing on the cake, and as a result, Muir Woods was much more fantastic than before, Golden Gate bridge was really Golden, Sausalito was like a fairy land and best of all, the 17-mile drive was heavenly bliss! Another week in LA and San Diego capped off what was a truly memorable trip in all respects! The first of many many more to come surely! :)

4. Season 2 begins...
would be a very wrong statement to make, especially since today is the last day of week 5 of Season 2, and there's only 11 weeks in all :D So, its more like season2 is half way thru! Again, courses are really interesting, in fact, the workload is much much more this time, but since I am in a better state of mind now, I am enjoying it all even more! How Google Street View works, detecting people in videos, writing my first research project proposal, building a working car out of Lego pieces after solving puzzles to make money to be able to bid for raw material, vehemently supporting Skype against the traditional telecoms in Scandinavia, learning team-building through the Beatles, bagging a high-profile Microsoft project on cloud computing for climatology to help Berkeley National Labs and ultimately, NASA, getting surprisingly large number of internship interview calls, especially when people obviously much smarter and more experienced than me have got fewer, and bagging a Qualcomm offer have only been a few high-points of this quarter yet. And mind you, its been only 5 weeks! :) There's definitely more in store!

I'll try to be here more often. But even if I'm not, keep the comments coming people. This is a fab way of sharing stuff and it wud be a pity if we do away with it! :) Till next time then, ciao!