How to train a graduate in Germany Sequel

(Drum rolls) I know what you all would be thinking, sequels are terrible : Frozen 2, Jumanji (Even though I haven’t watched it), Speed 2 or the next karate kid. But, hey, at least it is not a remastered edition which is quite unnerving. Why do people do it to classics, and both of us know the answer, money! After much excitement from my first blog (mostly from myself), I will continue to narrate my exquisite journey into stardom. Do I get recognized outside after writing this blog, and the answer is no, because I am currently under quarantine (believe me, kid, it is not going to change otherwise too). Though I did get a particular death threat from a certain central American. Know what, I am ready, though it might look like a butter knife.

I have been waiting for this my whole life.

Mushroom in the woods captured by me.

I believe that some of you would ask me that what is a mushroom doing there with me, well I wouldn’t go into a battle alone. Since our fight has been postponed due to the recent pandemic (Epico!), let us get back to my story. I realized that during my departmental orientation, I was fortunate (unfortunate) enough to be seated next to such a peculiar human (we are still conducting tests, as of now there is a 70 percentage match). Let us call this person Y, this how our first conversation was,

Moi: Hey, I am Karthigeyan, and I am from India.

Y: Hey, I am Y, from China. This course seems so tiring. I am feeling so sleepy.

And then, he slept through the orientation (internal screaming). I am sure most of my classmates could instantly recognize this person when I mentioned the word “sleep”. Every insomniac would be so jealous of Y, he can literally sleep anywhere. Classroom : done, Bus : done, Study room : done, eating : almost. Name it, he has done it. So, it was particularly very motivating to start my main’s (master’s) with this conversation. After much self-depreciation in the previous post, some of you asked me if have self-image issues. No, I did not mount it yet (there goes a bad joke), but maybe just a little. To bring balance to this (in Thanos’s voice : balance, as things must be), let me self-appreciate myself. I was particularly good at mathematics throughout my life before this moment. And this moment was 8 a.m. lecture on “Numerical methods for PDEs” with Prof. M. I don’t remember crying after the lecture, but I remember checking tickets back to India that day. It was quite expensive, so I decided to continue here. To put to context, we started with normed spaces, which I have never encountered in my whole life. And as you might have guessed, Y slept through most of lecture. And how do I know that, well Prof. M was particularly looking in his direction. You see, Y doesn’t particularly hide the notion that he is sleeping, it was quite apparent. But, in all fairness, Prof. M.’s lectures were amazing, and I continued to take all the courses offered by him. Moving on to the next lecture, things finally started to take shape. You see, the course name is quite pleasant and alluring, “Data analysis and visualization” (DAV, the visualization the course lacked) , but things were far from being the same. What was more tiring about this course is that we had only fifteen minutes to walk to this lecture which was about 20 minutes away from our first lecture.

Apfelstrudel. My first German dessert.

Imagine if your family or friends are visiting you, and you would like to show them your university. The problem is being that RWTH is spread throughout Aachen, and showing them the “campus” would takeaway their vacation (and mental peace). And you must be wondering, it must be particularly simple to navigate between classes and for exams. No, hell no, despite spending 2.5 years there, I have no clue about many of the institutes or their lecture rooms. I would look like a lost tourist with terrible language skills (though this is particularly true). Hate is a strong word, what I dislike about this course is that it tries to give in too much information for a 4 credit course. You know that one person in your extended family that outshines everyone, and everyone tries to look upto her/him. DAV tries to be this person. And what is particularly awful is that there is little visualization or analysis involved. It is just theory, with entirely no coding involved, and some self analysis. Also the fact that the responsible professor never showed up for the lecture, it was his assistants who handled the course. I have to look at my first semester study plan to recollect my other courses, just kidding (looking at the study plan in stealth), we were introduced to the mother of all lectures “Parallel Programming”. Let us talk about the positives of this course, since they are quite less, the lectures were pretty entertaining and quite informative. And, the tutorials associated to the lectures, not so much. In my opinion, they were pretty robotic and involved very less interaction. And the biggest problem being that we were clubbed with computer science and informatics students. One simply does not walk into their classes. Personally, I felt quite inadequate, whenever asked a question, before I could hear the question and process it, there were about 5 students in the lecture hall with 10 different solutions involving terms that would not even come in my nightmares. And what was to my bad taste is that the lecture halls were packed with about 120 students more and less. After this, I never took any courses involving more than 50 students. And one might ask, which courses are taken by so few students, and the answer is math related ones. The only problem being, the few students who took these lectures were extremely bright, leaving me with close encounters of PTSD (I will continue the story on this in future blogs, I am still on medication). Just when things were getting particularly downhill, we got to travel to Juelich to attend two of our courses which we imagined would be a highlight. And then we realised that lectures where early in the morning, and the lectures were about 90 minutes away from where most of us lived (particularly funny that I lived about 20 Km away from the city in my third semester, but we will get to that later).

Wuppertal, the beautiful monorail captured by me. Totally unrelated to this blog.

One thing that I love the most about Juelich is that, it is quite well preserved with nature. The only problem being that we did not have the luxury to walk around the campus after being overloaded with classes on this particular day. Thursday was Juelich day like Sunday is the day for the lord for people who visit the church. Only thing is we believed in science more, and there was enough evidence to answer various questions one might have. I might give you atheist vibes, but I am not an atheist, more of an antagonist. I am between both of extremes, so people who are both theist and atheist can relate to me. To put to context, before entering Germany I was a devout theist, and after leaving Germany, I am not one. So both communities can relate to me in some form. Enough of my out of context prose. So where were we, after this fun journey to Juelich, you will be greeted by the ever-smiling staff in the reception of the institution. I must be day dreaming, since it is so early in the morning, they weren’t even smiling. They just maintained a neutral expression, and in my one semester there, I never saw them smiling when they were with me. Come on, I was too short to be a fugitive. Since this institution had high security protocols, they had very strict rules on who could enter the institution. Due to some administration fallacy, I had to wait about a month for maybe a hour or two before the professor approved my entry into the institution. I always take the early bus with my Mexican nemesis (keep your friends close, enemies closer), reached before almost everyone, wait at the gate for approval and reach the lecture hall after everyone. Was the lectures worth this overkill, “Applied quantum mechanics” definitely was, the other lecture, not so much. I will keep you guessing what the other lecture would be. Surprisingly, this particular course had one of the lowest student turnouts. I wish I could give them an award, here is a poor man’s spaghetti. Why spaghetti, only time will tell. I believe that I complained much, and time to vent it out a bit later. Until next time. Whoosh! (I always wanted to use that spell – Prof. Mcgonagall, god what a difficult name to spell out!) . And know this, winter is coming (being someone from Madras/Chennai, that’s an one way ticket to Greenland).

I like this haiku, its strangely relevant.

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