Saturday, July 31, 2010

Seminar!!

This post is specially dedicated to those of my friends, who have elected 'Control Systems' to be their final year elective. Don't ask me why they did. Don't ask me why I did. We just did.
As any self-respecting Electrical engineer will tell you, the most mathematical and thus the most abstract topic inside Electrical engineering is Control Systems. Here, things are not seen, nor even visualised, it is pure imagination. And it is way less fun than what it sounds like. But let me get to the point.
There is a project that every one must do, and a powerpoint presentation that all must "present", once every Saturday. Today was the first such presentatation, and this post is dedicated to that, ...ermm.., memorable experience.
It started off happily enough. In a small room with enough Gizmos to put Darth Vader to shame, and 2 AC's freezing people to death, 3 profs started to call us forth. The first few to go up had no presentations and the regular 'be ashamed' talk flew thick and fast. The fun started from the third person. This friend of mine was planing to work on "Chaos Theory". Sounds good. He should have been left at that, but alas. Apparently, the profs couldnot make out the meaning of a particular signal, and started questioning him. Thanks to some quick thinking by my friend, and a good-mood prof, the guy was saved.
Another of my friends got it pretty rough. He had an extremely informative presentation, which is another way of saying that he had taken all that he could, from books, papers, journals et al, and copy-pasted it on the slides. "To JU, from the students, with love..."
Only, the profs didnot find it quite so funny. The cross was pretty unfair, if you ask me. How can you ask someone to explain a diagram, that he was seeing, maybe the second time in his life? Or if the original painter was stupid enough not to have put labels every where, how are we responsible?
Their were other moments too, when one guy was told that he was giving the presentataion, as if he were reading the Sacred texts(he was oscillating like a mechanical cuckoo, :\ ), and another, when a friend completely lost it, and tried to define the 'Earth frame of reference', resolutely denying that there was any earth in the vicinity.
But the last guy took the cake. When asked to finish the presentation in 5 mins, armed with around 10 slides, he could reach only slide 3, before 30 mins were up. Worse, he started the presentation with a pdf, not even a powerpoint presentation. Being called a plagiarist was only half his problems, when he started to condense around 2-3 months of effort into 10 slides. He was supposed to speak on underwater vehicles, but it was the presentation that was left gasping for breath.
What a day!
But make no mistakes, I dont blame any of my these students, though I might sound sarcastic. This course is supposed to be the first and last in BE, where we do something on our own. But that's the theory. In reality, we are given a host of topics, things that we are hearing for the first time in our lives, and asked to come with ingenious things overnight. In 1-2 weeks, we must get papers pertaining to the topic, application areas of the subject, and be ready to answer questions that sound more like Greek, and less like engineering. But the worst part is none of these.
The worst part is, the aim of this course is not to do someting on our own, but verify other people's models. And if the verification is succesful, ... voila..., you just did it. And all of this,when we are bogged down by coursework, right up to our neck.

In short, we are drugged, tied, gagged, hung upside down, and then they wonder why we cant come up with Beethoven's Ninth Symphony just like that. Now isn't THAT supposed to be a cakewalk?

And people actually exist, who believe we are wasting taxpayer's money, when we leave engineering for good. I don't think that they know what it feels like to chuck away four year's of your toils worth right out of the window. Many of my friends and seniors do. Hope someone will take note, before it is too late.

3 comments:

  1. that was really nice but i think you should have spared some words on our visitor the gentle man who was vested with the sole task of selecting people to present their slides just from the look of their faces

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  2. I know buddy, but it was the look on MY face that attracted him the most, it seems. SO I left him out--my revenge of sorts
    :P

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  3. Ha ha. Though not neant to be very hilarious, I did find it quite so. By the way, get results over night. I am getting my first petty results after 2 months of hard Toil. Sheesh!!!

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