Moved my blog

Dear All,
I have moved my blogs to http://ashforstudents.blogspot.com/. In a week or two I'll be starting a blog for parents viz ashforparents.blogspot.com. Enjoy.
Thanks and regards,
Ashirwad.

IS ENGINEERING YOUR DREAM OR YOUR PARENT’S DREAM?
Many a times its our parents dream. Its because either our parents themselves couldn’t become engineers or they became very successful engineers. I am not allowed to do what I want to do. My wife wanted to become a vet, she had to compromise on Ayurvedic Medicine. I meet so many students on campus who wanted to pursue their Aeronautical career but their parents wanted them to be Software or Electronics Engineers. I have many friends who expose their children to something like music or dance because they could not do it. There are parents where the child is 3yrs of age but they are clear about her future. She HAS to go to CBSE School and she SHOULD be an IAS officer. I couldn’t become one so I want her to become IAS. Her life will be SET once she is IAS.

I feel that these thoughts (what your parents want you to become) root from our own limitations and a wrong concept of ‘goal setting for others’. That is the wall that parents have built around themselves and around you students since your childhood. Now that you can think for yourself even then we continue to raise the width and height of those walls around us (both parents and students do that). Financial security has killed our natural instincts to grow. “I want to get my daughter married to …and hence she should be an Engineer.” “My value in dowry market will begin with 25L as an engineer. From 5th sem my would-be father-in-law is going to pay the fees ;)” Anything is possible here. So, there are some parents who are sure about their wards' career and there are some students who are clear about their career (what marks they get and how many compromises they do is a different story altogether). There is another set of students who don’t know what future is like. Engineering just happens to them.

All in all it will be a curve of students who are ‘not at all clear’ to students who are ‘completely clear’ about their future. Other level of influence will be from surroundings like parents, friends and relatives who will be ‘not at all clear’ to ‘completely clear’ about this individual. These 2 forces will decide what s/he does in the future. With such a state of mind a lot of students join engineering colleges.

There are many students who come to me and say ‘Sir, I cannot concentrate on my studies.’ After slowly getting into their thought process, in many cases, I’ve found they are doing engineering because somebody else wants them to be an engineer, not them. They wanted to be pilot or something else, as mentioned earlier. Till you don’t make up your mind that becoming an engineer is not my decision all these ‘concentration’ and ‘hormone-hijacking-your-timetable’ will keep happening. Align your goals. If you want to go to aeronautics, see what a job-description of an aeronautical software engineer is, see what research is happening in aeronautical software engineering. Become hungry then only can you eat. Colleges are busy feeding you with the information, the real need is to make you hungry. Then you will eat food yourself.

Now, if you are already into engineering then give all your energy to it and get your swiss-knife ready. Engineering is like a swiss-knife with as many subjects for engineering that many tools in the knife. Hone really well as many subjects as you like and the rest atleast get them ‘back’ of you. You don’t stay ‘back’, do whatever it takes. Master ONE subject out of so many that you read. Drill into the depth of one subject, just one. The world is an ocean and you will find a big horizon opening up for you for one subject that you loved, a place only for you if you are loving what you do and doing what you love.

Hope you have done well for your VTU exam papers that you appeared till now! All the best for your remaining papers!

SAUDAGAR BARDE:
I met a Computer Science student, Saudagar Barde from Solapur, on my way from Bangalore to Mumbai in Udyan Express. He got 99percentile in GATE exams and was heading Mumbai to appear for an interview at IITB for his MTech after an interview at IISc Bangalore. With his permission I am sharing the Q and A that I had with him.

Q. When did you really start programming?
A. Till ThirdYear (5th Sem) programming was like a magic. I decided to focus on GATE-exams then, and that gave me an AIM to look at. All my studies got oriented to GATE exams. Whatever I studied, I started looking for questions in GATE papers. “Pointers” was a big problem to deal with in 5th Sem.

Q. Was Maths a problem for you?
A. When Math Prof was unable to solve our problems we started group-study and got over our obstacles.

Q. How much did you score in your X, XII and then in BE?
A. I got 87.6 and 69.67% respectively and 120/150 in CET. In BE I got 71%. My GATE score the year I appeared for BE exams was 80percentile.

Q. Did you have a job offer?
A. Yes, but due to recession I was not sure if my job offer will materialise.

Q. Then what did you do?
A. I played safe. I had done some background work and had found out info about ACE Engg Academy, Hyderabad. I pursued my GATE studies from ACE which costed me about Rs.8000/-, 12 subjects to study, about 8 excellent profs to teach and a well equipped library to refer to. There were innumerable mock and grand tests which kept us on toes to prepare well for exams. The classes were 2.5hrs/day.

Q. Did you have a computer to experiment on your study programs?
A. No, it was more logical understanding and less programming that is required for GATE.

Q. How did you manage the struggle between staying awake v/s studying?
A. I had 2 more friends with me and we had hired a room in Hyderabad where we studied together. Peer pressure kept me awake.

Q. Did you do group study?
A. Yes. About 20% of the time was group study. It wasn’t planned. Whenever we had a doubt we use to raise it and immediately got it solved by discussing amongst each other.

Q. Do you have hobbies, did you maintain them during your BE days?
A. I am a swimmer. All four years of my engineering I use to swim 1hr daily.

Q. Anything else you want to mention?
A. Yes, we all 3 room partners got 99percentile.

Best wishes to Saudagar and his roomies!

My dear students, there are many obvious lessons Saudagar has for all of us to take back home. Only point I would like to make is ‘spend time on your passions’. My definition of passion is: when you do what you are passionate about, you get energy (as Markus Buckingham says in his book “The Truth About You”). Don’t confuse it with your dreams. Saudagar loves to swim, he did it consistently. Passions allows the fountain of your life energy to stay alive. I get energy when I sweep floor at my home, a lot of girls get energy when they dance. Find out when do you get the energy ? It could be very simple but YOU have to find it and it will enhance your study-dimension beyond what you can think of.

Best wishes!

Byhearting Computer Programs

Nothing is impossible! You can walk 1100Kms from Bangalore to Mumbai, you can drive, go by train or fly. All these are possible options but you have to wait for a while and think what’s in for you. Likewise you can by-heart contents from a news paper, from your text books. From the heading of the topic you know what I am trying to arrive at. Don’t ever ever mug up a computer program. You are stepping on a wrong stone. I know many of you have so much retention power that you can mug up anything but that’s not the way a few things are done. One of those few things is a computer program. Your next question is, out of 20 programs asked how should we go about writing them in our exams?

When you first get introduced to computers (VTU’s CCP subject) you should understand clearly that learning computer programming is a total shift from normal way of your studying Maths, Physics or Basic Electronics. Those subjects need you to understand the logic and by-heart a few things and you are done. There is a chance that if a few things are not correct you could still get some marks, not 0 which is what happens when you computer program goes wrong. While you are learning programming you don’t know why you add #include , you don’t know why you do ‘cc test.c’ and then why you do “./” in “./a.out”. There are far too many unknowns when you learn CCP. Question is how do you break into so many things and slowly seep into the world of good computer programming? I suggest you to document all the questions about the non-C related things that you have and concentrate only on ‘C’ related doubts. Understand

-How ‘for’ loops inside ‘for’ loop (nesting) is different from 2 separate ‘for’ loops.

-How ‘continue’ changes the flow of the code totally

-How ‘switch-case’ is glorified ‘if-else’

One needs to STOP too much reading of programming books but sitting by the computer and start going from Program1 in the syllabus and seeing how the complexity has been gradually increased. If you are measuring the amount of reading you have done for computer programming then its time you change the scale to amount of time you’ve spent on the computer understanding simple things like ones listed above. Your time on computer is all. Please, for heaven’s sake, don’t by-heart the computer program. You may succeed today but remember that you are stepping on the wrong stone and you are bound to fall sooner or later.

When you are told to do matrix multiplication or any complex program to write amongst your 20 exam programs follow these things:

- Make a quick flowchart, only if required. Many times its not required.

- Write an algorithm, again if required.

- Start writing your program.

If you don’t need above 2 steps start writing your program on the answer sheet and say, now you are stuck, you don’t know how to proceed. In such a case make a habit of writing a very very essential part of your flowchart or algorithm on the back of your answer sheet and get the doubt cleared. If you are satisfied with it then come back to your C program and see if you can code it.

Once you are done fixing your compilation errors, you will run ‘./a.out’ and mostly you will not get the output that you expected.

I recommend using ‘gdb a.out’ and single stepping into your program line by line and seeing if everything is going fine or not. Gdb is a debugger which stops the clock of the system and gives you a finer control over each line of C code. The difference between running ‘./a.out’ and ‘gdb ./a.out’ is you are vrooming on MG Rd at 100 Km/hr v/s you are walking on the MG Rd. While walking you can see every thing, you can do window shopping, buy things at your own pace. You cannot do these activities while you are in a car going at 100Km/hr. See http://arioch.unomaha.edu/~jclark/gdb_plus.html for basic gdb commands like print, b (break point), run, next, quit etc.

All the best!

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
-- George Bernard Shaw

All speak one day per week in English.

Many higher education colleges are not set in urban backgrounds. A lot of students and teachers struggle to speak in English and fall back to the local medium very easily. The college I work for is also in rural background. The college has an English teacher who help students to improve their English. I think learning good English needs to be attacked from many sides. For the same reason I initiated a Toastmasters Club (see http://toastmasters.org for those who don't know what Toastmasters is) and about 9 students have signed up knowing its benefits. The second activity I initiated was, why not all speak at college in English once in a week and that activity came out as following details on the notice board. Read through.

25th May, 2009.
My Dear All (Staff and Students),

I don’t want to steal your heart away from your mother tongue, I don’t want to steal the tunes that you hum from songs in your mother tongue. Just want you to add ENGLISH to your ever growing quiver (a case for holding arrows).

ACTION: Can we all SPEAK In ENGLISH one day per week, consciously?

WHY: STUDENTS wake up to harsh realities of the real world NOW! Tomorrow never comes! A day is not far when you will be sitting on an interview table.

WHEN: Every WEDNESDAY of a week, morning 8:30am onwards.

HOW: Staff-to-staff, staff-to-students and student-to-students converse in English ONLY.

PARTICIPANTS: Principal, Lecturers, Administrative Staff, Librarian and Students.

COST: No money, no time. It costs you getting in an UNCOMFORTABLE ZONE of grappling for words, struggling to make sentences and asking for help from friends and teachers.

LEARNING: Speaking and Vocabulary are primary benefits, Reading and Writing are secondary benefits.

MISTAKES: Perfectly acceptable. Staff and friends help the defaulter. They help him orally and morally!

CAUTION: Don’t laugh at others if you cannot help. They are helping themselves. A group can decide to defeat the idea if they want to. Can you be wary and stick to the rule, not for yourself but for your friends!? I know its all hard, but not impossible if you decide to bring about a change.

SCORE: Participants who have helped others or themselves put one green token in a jar and pick out one chocolate out of the same jar. The quality of the chocolates will improve from Alpenliebe to Dairy Milk to Roasted Almond if I see improvement in the number of people speaking in English :)

Lets have some fun, belittle our ego and get out of this mess called ENGLISH which has only 5 vowels (against a dozen vowels in Indian languages) which is one of the primary cause of our confusion. It’s a language where ‘but’ and ‘put’ sound different, where no vowel is pronounced the way it is e.g.
‘a’ is pronounced as ‘e’pple (apple),
‘e’ is pronounced as ‘a’ as in aliphant (elephant),
‘i’ is pronounced as ‘e’ as in ‘egloo’ (igloo),
‘o’ is pronounced as ‘au’ in ‘aulive’ (olive),
‘u’ is pronounced as ‘a’ in ‘altimate’ (ultimate). It’s all messed up.

If you might find me grappling with Kannada please help! naan Kannada kaliyuttene, adikke.
Thanks and regards,Ashirwad.

We had only 2 Wednesday's when above experiment was tried. I look at it as just sowing a seed. A lot of energy is required to take it through which I am seeing in many students...

All the best!

Convert ideas into pics and acronyms.

Let me display my qualification first :) and then get to the topic. In the student years till my Masters from BITS, Pilani and then 14 years in IT there were a lot of tips and tricks that I gathered (many from others and a few of mine). Allow me to begin sharing those. When my dad started for office 2 decades back he use to mur mur "Pe, Ru,Cha, Pa,Pa". It literally meant Pen, Rumal (hankie, you need one in Mumbai), Chavi (key), Pakit (wallet) and Pass (railway season ticket). This checklist helped him ensure that all that's required before getting out of house is with him. While he was with me in Bangalore he tweaked it and converted it to "Mo,(Ti),Ru,Cha,Pe,Pa" where Mo is mobile phone, Ti is for ticket which should be used if you are travelling and one Pa got converted to Pe for pen.

In my IX standard one Chemistry teacher (Sharma Sir) engraved 3rd row elements of Periodic Table in my heart. He told us to remember a Hindi sentence "na maaji, alsi paaji, so gaya hai chlorine aur argon peeke". This literally means, "Mummy, don't worry, the lazy bugger has drunk Chlorine and Argon and he has slept off". Its easy to write the list Na, Mg, Al, Si, P, S, Cl, Ar if you remembered the sentence. Similar lists are available to remember 9 planets, Mother Very Easily Made Jan Stop Using Nail Polish and resistor colour codes.

Can you students come up with such lists which will help you remember some important pieces in your syllabus from loads of information that you are cramming in your heads.

Dont waste too much time in creating lists if you cannot make them. Instead, draw tiny diagrams, cycle charts, graphs, formulae around your notes or text books of your understanding of the subject in addition to those that are available in books. Use colours to add more meaning to the diagrams, use highlighters. Let those tiny diagrams pop out and talk to you when you open the book the next time. Recently I was happy to see how how a bubble sort is displayed on wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_sort). A picture is worth 1000 words. Picturise as many concepts as you can.

I am poor at remembering things. I use to write all that I had to cram, sometimes thrice. Writing slows down the speed of your mind to such an extent that if the logic is understood there is no other way but to remember the concept. You have to strike a balance between applying logic and writing-to-remember. I had to correct a XII standard student who was trying to mug up concepts of Magnetism without understanding the meaning of word 'fictitious'. Many of us are lazy to pick up a dictionary and look for the meaning of words and then we blame it on poor concentration. As a student we should know what we don't know.

So, for non-Maths subjects the flow of study looks like:
1-Read the concept
2-Visualise, apply logic, imagine what it is
3-Draw/picturise the concept
4-Write if you don't remember
5-Reproduce
6-Juggle/iterate above steps as per your need.

Best wishes!