The first day of my college. Mom and dad came along with me to drop me off at the hostel. The initial procedures took a lot of time. I had myself photographed and paid the fees. And then had to fight messy un-queued people to get my room allocated.
My roommate was allocated two rooms and he choose to choose the other room. I was petty much left alone the first day. My mother made friends with my neighbors, and told me to be friends with them. At that point of time, I wasn’t interested in friends, I just wanted to see how the college life worked. And I was scared to death about ragging. The same day night, a stupid prof and the registar come to tell us to shout – "Help! Help!" if any of the seniors try to rag us. The seniors were petty much cool. We were asked to introduce ourselves, a little bit of singing, dancing and that was petty much about it. Well, it didn’t even qualify as ragging, compared to what I heard from my other friends in NIT’s and IIT’s.
The first day of classes. As usual, I woke up after the whole floor was up and running around. And since my room was opposite to the washrooms, I couldn’t stay on the bed. By the time I was up and ready it was 7:30 and most of the rooms, were locked away and the people have already left for the lecture theaters, pit stopping at the canteen. By the way, some of us were allocated rooms in the ground floors of the girls hostel, which was petty much in the end of the campus, while the LT’s were on the other end. While, I was embarrassed for a few days, for living in the girls hostel, but I later started thinking I would have the opportunity to look at hots chicks.
I with, a few of my classmates from the Gowtham college, who also happened to end up in the same college, started off from the hostel. The path was all messed, infact there wasn’t any, we found ourselves the shortest way out of the mud. The canteen was already buzzing with ‘new’ students. I hardly could differentiate who’s the senior and who’s my batchmate. We each grabbed a plate of ‘poha’ and milk, found a cosy place to finish them off. And marched to the LT, pondering about why the campus had all twisted pathways. By the time we reached the LT, the LT was almost full, guess we were the last to enter. The first benches were as usual, occupied by people or by some notebooks on the desk. I walked up to the last benches, which were sparsely occupied. Well, I was the only one late to the lecture, people still came in after the professor was on the dias.
Before the class started, I looked around – The place resembled a houseful movie theater. The lecture started and the professor was quite intimidating. And there were one more lecture and then there was a break. People mingled and introduced themselves to each other. I was too sleepy to go out and make new friends. Said Hi to some familiar faces and frowned at the ones i didn’t know.
The first week wasn’t so hectic nor was troublesome. There were only lectures and no labs. Then soon started the labs from the second week. Assignments poured in. The computers systems and softwares were new to me, though I wasn’t completely alienated. There were a few, who were using the keyboard and mouse for the first time, and didn’t know what an OS does. I petty much knew what OS stood for and a little more than an average student in our class, but like, I was invincible.
The electronics labs were a nightware to almost everyone in my group – Group 3. Oh! ya the whole batch of around 240 people were divided into 4 groups. As usual, we had our own scheduled timings for all the labs. We had 2 computer science courses, one electronics, one mathematics, one humanities and something which was supposed to act a bridge from our junior college stuff to the engineering college stuff. I particularly didn’t like any of the courses. But, enjoied the introduction to ICT stuff very much, we atleast had the ‘limited’ freedom of doing things our way.
From the computer science stream we were taught ‘C’. I had learnt it long back after my 8th standard, but it was was mystic enought to freak me out. Other was called ‘Computer Systems Organization’. The Prof. taught was how programs in assembly language are written and used, without teaching us the underlying architecture of the computer. Okay, we were just shown some boxes and arrow, which made no sense to me.
The electronics course was awesome, it was full of all basic concepts which again were bewildering. Some labs were easy, some were tough and a few we never could complete them on our own. Somehow, I and my partner completed our labs, either doing it ourself or by copying it from our neighbours, who in turn copied the results from someone else.
The humanities was good to hear, hard to practice/imagine stuff. It was like the hard-core realities of life. It was anthropology. We were taught by one of the best anthropologists in India and I for the first time heard him swear -’Fuck’. My eyes popped out and I said to myself – WTF. Our batch was particularly afraid of him, because he failed 180 students in a batch of 270 of our seniors. We did his assignments and listened to his lectures with pin drop silence.
I dozed off in most of lectures, barely ‘listened’ to the ones, in which I was awake. Then came the mid-semester exams. I didn’t fare too bad, but neither did top the class. I was happy.
