The Program Is Not Compiling

"Mam, the program is not compiling. But everything is perfect you see. There must be something wrong with the compiler. What do I do?". A very confident first year graduate M.Tech student asked Miss Karanveer Kaur during her lab duty.

Data Structure is a subject I know very little!! Still it has not been that much of a problem to be a lab of a course on DA but the weekly 3 hours used to be quite tiresome. Mam was not ready to accept that it is highly unlikely that anything is wrong with the extensibly tried, tested and used commercial compiler inbuilt in PC. It was shortly discovered that a stray semi-colon was causing all the trouble.

I had been given a different job. I was supposed to do a twoway linked list program. This is an institute level course and is compulsory for all M.Tech student of LPU as wel as me.

 Mam was a young assistant lady professor who seems to be extremely sincere in teaching the new students the basics of programming. Unfortunately I could not do justice to her I was initially assigned. Though she told me " I want you to be in the lab as wel as class lecture expressing interest in algorithyms & designing. I want to give you a chance". I strongly believe the main cause was my unsatisfactory performance. A very decent good looking woman that she is. Miss Karanveer Kaur did not tell me anything on my face. Anyway, I liked her much much more!!

In course of my few months' stay at LPU, I have found the university remarkably different from the institute I graduated from. One very pleasing observation has been that, most of the teachers seem to be least bothered about CA/marks/grades, etc. Unlike ITME most of them really have the mind to teach. So I found the academic culture very different. Naturally B.Tech final year and dual degree students are as expected much more competent than most of us.

Also I found all the staffs of LPU,  taken from the serving food in mess to the people in different administrative offices,  very much dedicated to their jobs. My experience has so far been very different and very bitter in LPU. I was used to receiving very hostile kind of response from staffs most of the times. A few days back the sweeper of our wing of the hostel (I have been told by friends that this hostel of LPU is of great historical importance!!) on his own offered me to carry out an "intensive clean-up operation" in my room ( it became very much necessary although), something really hard to imagine in any other place.

Despite many fond attributes of this place, the first semester has been very very painful for me. I doubt whether anybody can even imagine a more burdened course structure than ours!!

As I told Miss Karanveer was the instructor of the Advanced Data Structures and Algorithms course. The course mostly contained data structures which have been designed keeping amortization in mind. We have been taught Linkedlist, Stack, Q, Trees, Graph data structures. I found these things highly involved, extremely complicated, and the purpose of so much of complications was not very readily comprehensible (at least to me). So it was somewhat discouraging. Also given the volume of topics the instructor ran through, we were not in a position to put in a lot of effort in understanding these things in reasonable details, although we had no shortage of reading materials including research papers introducing these concepts. So I ended up having a partial and very sketchy knowledge on these things.

Things were on similar notes in other courses also. CSE 501 was a graduate course on searching and indexing techniques in databases that I registered for. But had I known how the course would be like, I wouldn't have thought of registering!!! I doubt whether the teacher at all left out any indexing data structure discovered till date!! Most of them being trees of very peculiar and annoying names: 2-4 tree, B tree,  R-tree,  R* tree,  R+ tree,  X,Y,Z tree to name a few. Adding to that were extremely heavy implementation assignments and a course project. I didn't think I would complete the course and would get a decent enough grade at the end.  But I found the course disgusting...you study a lot of things, all in a superficial outlinish manner. But there might be something wrong with me, as there is a good interest in databases in ITME IT and there are reasons to believe that Miss Karanveer has to some extent served to arouse that interest.

I got 0 in Data Structure & 17 in Distributed OS in mid semester examination. Though quite a few students, also got less than 20. Yet getting a zero is not a matter to take pride in! I took up these course with a lot of hope (the name sounded interesting), but the courses has let me down. The instructor of DOS Mandeep Singh speaks some hindi despite being a (probably) Punjabi (Though my hindi is poor, it's supposedly better than the Punjabi hindi that the sardar guys out here speak). But one Tamil batchmate of mine seems to be completely ignorant of Hindi. Same seems to the case with a Keralite. Now I am trying to invent a thumb rule for the highly confusing gender thing!

Distributed OS is a course I might say I did more or less well in. I liked it. It introduced it's purposes, difficulties and objectives. It also gave me a feel of randomized techniques. I also saw some really nice proofs of some problems based on excellent information theoretic arguments or reduction from a known hard problem. Also we learnt some new and really delightful methods for solving scalability problems but however one can say one is supposed to learn these in a first course on scalability theory. But I couldn't put in much effort due to loads imposed by other courses. Nevertheless, it might not be a lie to say that I have gained something from this course.

So this, in short, is how my start off in the new place has been like. I am looking forward to go home in holidays !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!