How to train a graduate in Germany |Sequel^Sequel

What a weird title, one might ask? Well internet is full of weird and obscure things, and my blogs are no different. In order to be partly rebellious against the Romans in support of my Greek friend, I thought long and hard to come up with such a creative title. To be honest, titles can be much more obscure too, “Honey, I blew up the kids” for a starter. As rightly pointed out by my soon-to-be blogger friend, I made a tremendous mistake. A sin, no priest can give me redemption from I guess. If you would have noticed, I had the sounds made by mouth as “white noise” instead of “brown noise“. A grave mistake indeed, I already feel like I must have rice krispies as breakfast and slurp a glass of beer.

One day is fog.

One day is snow. Weather app prediction never mattered anymore.

Without further adieu let us get back to our story. Sweet October is over, and birth month of the devil writing this prose arrives. Things did not get too cold, but for someone from a tropical climate, it is impossible to feel comfortable with just one pair of clothing. The day when it started getting cold, I ran a little experiment to determine the optimal number of clothes I need to wear to protect myself from the cold. But this experiment lasted for two and half years, and still I don’t know the optimized number of clothes (I remember my European/Asian friend screaming at me to wear more clothes when it was cold, and I laughed it off). When assignments started piling up and lectures got tougher, there were fewer free during weekends. Apart from mildly celebrating my birthday with two of my roommates and a friend of theirs, I spent most of my free time either in libraries or study rooms. The assignments from “Numerical methods” (NM) and “Applied quantum mechanics” (AQM) was quite laborious and exhausted most of my wake hours. I had to consult some of my friends to enquire about their positive experience with regards to “Data analysis and visualization” (DAV) since my processor got overloaded during this course or I might have moved this memory to trash.

Snow covered lane near the library.

Prepping for the Christmas blog next.

After reading their responses, I recycled some of my memory regarding this course. In a gist, we did not have any assignments weekly, we had exercise sessions every week where we are shown the solution to problems posted a day before. Now that I think about it, this is probably the worst way to learn something, and would not recommend anyone to follow such methodology. The coolest part about this course as told by my yoshi-loving-friend, he loved the philosophical chapter of this course and the graphs too. In about the end of this course, we were taught to look at images in another dimension, precisely in more depth. No, not in z direction, but in the sense of introspection, and appreciate them through the laws bestowed by philosophy. Unfortunately, none of us had our “eureka” moment except possibly the lecturer. Also, the implicit understanding between the visualization and our brains, and the idea of associating it with simpler objects was something informative to know. The highlight of this course was our visit to the “cave” (though it would have been cool to visit a real cave, this was more of a virtual reality setup). This chamber consisted of a VR setup through which we are able to visualize and appreciate “particle tracing” in a simulative environment. It was really impressive to follow the trajectories of particles, based on predetermined simulation paths calculated by Graphical processing units (GPUs). Pretty wacky stuff right? Now imagine yourself staying in the cave, day in and day out for the entire duration of your PhD thesis. Oh their poor minds, no wonder they try to load themselves with so much content. One segment which was really useful for me in the later stages of my life is dimensionality reduction. It is a deviously simple concept which has manifold level of advantages. Imagine you have a three dimensional dataset, with one of the dimension having as little information as my blog series has and you would like to eradicate them (not so simple for my blogs, that power is in my hands, you can simply ignore them). One of my favourite techniques to be able to implement this is Principle component analysis (sweetly abbreviated as PCA, I know right, adorable). I would not go into much details, but your resulting dataset will be reduced by a dimension (“there is no such thing as magic, and then I saw PCA” – Uncle Vernon). On a side note their exams were quite challenging, not in relation to difficulty, but we will catch on that later.

Another dose of kinderpunsch. Now I feel like an alcoholic.

I was definitely 18+ but nevertheless this is how I felt and was seen as.

I realized that, I did not pen down much on my experiences with “Applied quantum mechanics”. We were taught by one of the best professors I had the pleasure of studying under in my lifetime. For someone who had a little knowledge and exposure towards quantum mechanics, his teachings helped me think out of the box. I realized rather slowly, how effective his way of teaching was. Initially, I was quite disappointed with myself, since I did not do the necessary groundwork before attending his initial lectures. After I spent some time reading the two books he had recommended, and also working on my linear algebra, I finally got a hold onto the content of the course. And then we moved to time dependent equations and things started going haywire (just kidding, if only, please do not increase my medication). But then, surprise, we had a guarding angel of a tutor, who helped us throughout the course. Honestly, he is the most emphatic and kind tutor that I have ever had, and probably will ever have. Being such a nagging student, I was surprised that he did not quit his PhD after he had me as one of his students. After all, he was a former SiSc student too, so our hearts are made of steel after we complete this program. As a supplement to the completion of this course, the professor gave us an introduction on foundations of quantum computing. Before this lecture, I had no idea about quantum computing. After this lecture, I still had no idea about quantum computing, but I knew some terms related to them. Later in life, this lecture heaped my interest to learn more about it. And in my opinion, that is how education must be. A good professor must develop our curiosity towards a subject of their expertise. We may not understand everything that they would want to convey, but with the right directions and guidance, we could learn more about it through self motivation. German education, as I understand it is based on these principles. It promotes self discipline and self learning through necessary motivation. Though I did not excel in these courses which were completely exclusive of my previous education, I thoroughly enjoyed learning them. My experience with other math related electives were quite similar to the above mentioned. Setting aside my grades, I have no regrets regarding any of the electives that I had opted to take, despite their difficulty and irrelevance with respect to my previous education. My electives were not well structured, they did not pertain to a certain discipline. Since I wanted to put myself in a difficult situation and I was not well aware what I wanted to do after my main’s (master’s), my electives were quite wayward. I would write more about them in the future blogs. I am not the best person to ask regarding what electives one has to take, since my experiences would be nowhere similar to yours. But as a disciple of math and fluid related courses, I would recommend you to take one to broaden your perspective. Any creative suggestions for the title of the next blog would be given due credit (honestly I am running out of ideas). Story to be continued in the following blog. 😀

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