Do u knw to make good coffee??

I just browsed thru' my blog. As correctly suggested by many, i have given a total one-sided view of the preparation phase. Coming to the interesting aspects of it, let me just start with this post. Someone says only geeks nd bookworms make their way thru GATE. Here we stand as "Exception"-al examples of that. These are some thoroughly enjoyed interludes of our Preparations days. This post, as u might realise in the end, serves dual purpose. First is to tell you how much fun preps can be. The second is to let out my frustrations.

If anyone comes to me asking suggestions for successful preparation, the question i shoot out is, Well, "first ask yourself if you knw to make good coffee??". How important can making coffee be. I would say, preps can be incomplete without coffees. Often we come across days wen we need to stay up overnight. It becomes nearly impossible without caffeine. Well sometimes it keeps us just as much alert, to realize that we're falling asleep. Quite often, sleeping over the Big Cormen Book, waking up in the morning and finding torn pages, it happens to everyone. You are not an exception. If this is ur problem, then coffee is there to help you out.

Usually everyone prefers the Mom-Made-Coffee, for it is amazing to taste, given in a tray, in neat porcelain wares, ready to be consumed, and wat not. I strictly do not believe in making parents stay up all night along with us. For all that you know, they might not have stayed up like for themselves.So it is always better to learn making 'GOOD' Coffees. And i cry because i was the only one who knows to make coffee in the study group that we had. Always asking 'why god only me?'. (Now karthik must be fuming, @karthik :well i am talking abt 2009 preps).

I am a genuine host always wanting to help my guests and make them feel comfortable. I make coffee whenever we have a night-out at my place. Thats understandable. But when we have night outs at someone else's place, then guess who makes coffee? its me again. It becomes a little embarrassing to work in a kitchen thats not urs. And of course u cant be working wen ur supposed to sit and enjoy. Anish, now learn to make coffees, it might help u in ur married life(remember u had great plans, 1 wife, 2 children, etc. Oh sorry i didnt realise i was blogging ) !!

Sometimes we miscalculate the proportion nd coffee might just fall short by half a glass. Well guess who's going to pay the price? the person who makes it. And all the more fun if it is the same person who makes it always. Now i think u understand my woes.

Somehow after all this, i found my kitchen to be an exotic location where i can study really well leaning on the granite slabs. Try this. It really WORKS !!

Pathway to GATE 2008

After being introduced to a massive 20 subject syllabi, we were awestruck. But it was more of an astonishment than the pressure to perform well. In the Begining we were asked to choose some subject of our choice and start preparing comprehensively.It all looked the same, atleast for me. I chose Computer Networks. I could have very well chosen any other subject over Networks. But this choice so happened to be the best one i have ever made. This happens to be the only subject,of all, that captures my interest. 

I picked up Computer Networks by Andrew S Tanenbaum, started reading it on a regular basis. Sometimes addicted, i could simply not leave the book alone. It was informative, humorous and interesting. I could finish most parts of the book within a week. And too much of anything, as u know, is good for nothing. I litterally dragged on with the book throughout the next week. 

Now came the group meeting when we teach each other the topics learnt in the past week. As karthik started his preparation early, most of these meetings were dominated by him, not surprising though. Just to give a background, I was the first in the group to have ever touched the Networks Book with an aim to solve the questions asked in GATE. Everyone explained the topics that they had learnt the previous week. Their teaching was good enough that we were able to solve some problems asked in GATE, just immediately after. When my turn came, i was able to express in mere words what i had learnt. Though not inherently good at explaining things, i managed to just scrape through. When the topic shifted to solving some network problems to end the discussion over, we tried solving some previous years questions. Most of the problems in networks (if u have prepared for GATE, u would know) had a huge description and took almost an entire minute to just finish reading the question, leave alone the understanding part of it. These problems always scared the hell out of us that we leave such questions almost always in the initial mock tests. Coming back to the narrative, from all that i had learnt the previous week, i could not even solve one problem. Disappointed, we closed the session that day.

Though depressing at times, the desire to succeed somehow drove us to pitch in a lot of hardwork. We just managed to get good scores in the mock tests entirely relying on the basic subjects like Digital Logic, Basic computer architecture, Data Structures, Algorithms etc. We realised that further progress could not be made unless we master atleast a few more subjects. With semester exams coming in between, it became all the more difficult to balance GATE preparation and the college curriculum. Flunking atleast 3 subjects in each model semester exams, we had to write RE-TESTS, and of course the RE-RE-Tests in case we failed in the Re-test. This process continued until days before the start of the semester exams. No wonder why our college tops the Pass Percentage list, among the 250 Engg colleges in the state.

By the end of the 5th semester, the aggregate percentage had downcurved. From a constant 86%. It was dipping below 84. When we took the issue with karthik, he had a happy news for us. He said he made a good 76% in his 7th semester. It was a great relief for us. Atleast we understood that some trade-offs need to be made between the two. The significant landmarks achieved in this period were

• Me finishing Computer Networks, solving almost all problems.
  
• Anish Mastering Theoretical subjects
  
• Pawan Mastering  Computer Architecture.
  
• Karthik consistently getting within AIR10 in mock tests.
  
• Succesfully converting Anish(who used to sleep at 9PM sharp) into a nocturnal, just like us.
  

LAST MONTH PREPARATION

      

               With just one month left out, we had to speed up the preparation. In this period, we left karthik on his own and struck to the plans he had made. After all we knew this was his serious      Game (ALL-REALS, not TRIALS(if u know the street cricket slang)).[sorry about using recursive constructs]. He  had to sandwich the learning schdeule for computer networks and a few other subjects. Though it went on well, it resulted in a Burn-out.  He almost didnt touch his book for the last 10 days. According to me, the last month preparation is very crucial and missing out on it is a game lost. Also there is the TIME factor. U never know what happens in the 3 hrs of the exam. The Preparation Time lost by you is the mark gained by the others by utilizing that time. So it is always better to finish with the basic preparation early and keep revising the same in the last month.

Taking into account all the mistakes that we committed, and we thought we had committed, and of course a lot of feedbacks from Karthik, we were able to refine the plan and implement them in our 2009 preparation.

GATE 2008 ended well with karthik making AIR242. The highest in cs dept that year. Also getting almost 4 admits across india in most IITs and IISc. It was a good experience for us helping us perfect our plans for the next year.

Before Gate 2008

HISTORY OF PROPAGATE CS

Yet another 12th std flunker failing to make it big in IIT-JEE. May be i should ve decided that it was not my piece of cake. May be not, i was very close to making it big, but just missed it because it was destined not to happen. Craving for another chance to make it big, after endless thoughts of dropping a year and studying, with high reluctance, joined Meenakshi Sundararajan Engg. College. The initial days were terrible, only to be realised soon that my college was not all that bad.

Quickly by the end of 1st semester, realised that i was good at programming (atleast as compared to others in my class). Could this be a begining to a new success story?? Not yet.

With a lot of hope to make it big, joined a java class, stood first in the class too. But this could mean one of the two things. One that i am really good. and the other 'may be the others were worse than me'.   

EFFECT OF KRANTI'08 on my career (Karth-"Rags" Effect)

                  KRANTI, for those who do not know what it is , is our annual technical symposium conducted by the 3rd yrs. People good at various fields lead a team consisting of many 2nd yrs to organize an event. There was this event called Code Debugging, lead by Karthik Raghavan, my senior. With not many interested in programming, both from my class as well as his, we could not avoid being in touch with each other. 

Discussing long hours of interesting programming questions, we decided to give the participants a tough time. Took the good old theoretical computer science books, designed challenging questions that were probably never asked in the history of any programming contest. Managed to give a list of NP-complete and NP-Hard problems, asking them to solve it. Hence was born the real interest in Computer Science.

One day, Karthik comes up and tells there is this exam called GATE, the expansion of which neither of us knew. He says he had written it with minimal preparation and that the paper was pretty easy. Then came the result and he stood All India 800. Karthik decided to write GATE again and better his performance with a little bit of serious preparation.Karthik, being a serious GRE aspirant, the news of GATE was pretty shocking. He now needed a bunch of serious aspirants with whom he can prepare. 

After long hours of convincing pawan and anish, a group was formed. Hence the PROPAGATE-CS was born.