Monday, January 12, 2015

Day 9 : I Opened A Textbook



Finally opened the textbook today. And I have not opened one since college. 'Twas surreal.

Sure I read books all the time. In that sense, currently I am reading Angel of Death by Higgins. But unless Sean Dillon goes ahead and discusses SQL query to transpose rows into column without using CASE WHEN, this book cannot really be called a textbook. Textbooks are basically a big boring book with a lot of pages, written in dreary language and occasional grammatical mistakes, every step of everything detailed out in even the tiniest of details. That does make it sound a lot like 50 Shades doesn't it?

Anyhow. Here I am with an open textbook in front of me again. The last time I ever opened one was a Mathematics one, filled with equations and calculus. I hated it. This is one about a SQL primer course. And I sort of like it. I think it’s because now the book that I've taken up was of interest to me, and maybe something that I would actually like to learn more about. Of my choosing.

If you know anything about the education system in India, you would know this much - the student never has a say in anything.

In any and every education up until Post Grad. The only choice you can ever take up is - engineering or doctor, biology or computers. Sure there are a bunch of others Bachelors/Masters studies available out there. But if you are from the middle class and have shown even an iota of brains during schooling, you are forced in either of these paths. Nothing else is even an option for you. Most of us choose engineering, because let’s be honest about it, medicine is a serious/tedious business. (Couple of years working in IT has taught me, our lives aren’t all that peachy either.)

Your choices when you do get into engineering are also pretty limited. You have mostly four - mechanical, computer science, electrical, IT. I still honestly think the Mech guys are the real engineers; at least they end up creating something that they can actually hold and say "I made this". IT/CS, even some ECE guys are just service guys without that sort of ownership privilege.

I personally know hundreds of folks from my college alone, out of which I can name just a handful of them who is actually doing something of worth, related to what we were taught in college. And from them only one is from CSE/IT. What most of us do now in their day jobs is a long way different from what we were taught in school. Sure the basic stuff is the same. But the application is poles apart. It might sound apples and oranges, but I really think if given a choice/exposure back then. There are a lot of things I could have kick started doing early in my career.

All that is gibberish I know. I tend to ramble when I am in the vicinity of technical documentation. Anyone who has attended an engineering exam knows this. You could ramble on about anything to get that 10-points answer right.

I remember preparing for exams, one month Prep Leave, one month of long exams cycle with bunch of gaps between papers. Searching of textbooks and class notes at the last moment. Put off the actual preparation up until the last couple weeks and sleep through all the previous ones. Spend hours just hanging out with friends, playing cards all day. Wake up at midnight, to drink team and biscuits from Hostel canteen. Damn I feel way too nostalgic right now.

Today, I think there will be a lot more of that than any real learning.

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