End of Term two

Term two got over almost 10 days ago. But it seems to be far far away now. It has distorted my sense of  passage of time.

I firmly believe now, that the human sense of time is shaped by the amount of activities that we do. If we can somehow be made to do an year's worth of work in two and half month, then we might as well feel that a year has elapsed. This was exactly how I felt when I came out of the exam hall after writing the last paper. Even though, it started only mid-September, a lot happened in between. And because of that, it often feels as if the activities took place some long time back and were stretched over a long time period.  

We organized a couple of fests (sports and biz) and had holidays for that. I participated in the biz fests. And prepared for that as well. We (me and my teammates) made it to the finals of three events. We missed out closely on cash prizes in two events (coming 2nd and 3rd), and were nowhere close in the third. But anyway, it was a good experience. Besides this, I participated in case study competitions by companies coming in for summer recruitment, and in quizzes. Did well in some, not so well in others.

Then there were routine projects for almost every subject. There were two for the maths, 1 for marketing, 2 for an HR subject, 1 (still pending) for a finance course, 3 in operation and 1 in communication. These were combined with timely surprise quizzes and normal announced quizzes. The strategy seems to be to keep students on their toes all the time. Most of the students are college toppers, and hence unlikely to compromise on marks. So teachers can easily slice up the 100 marks for each course into as small as possible ‘pieces’ (of tests, assignments, projects, class participation etc) and then sit back and let students compete for those. It gets cut-throat then. 

There were summer placements too. PPTs in the evenings, resume submission, application writing, form filling, case practice, mock interviews, and then brushing up your own fundamentals. These require hours and hours. There was a 15 day long gap for the summer placements and the 5 days of interviews were really testing. We would get up early in the morning at 5:30 am since the process starts at 6:30. And then the interviews go on until 10:30 pm at night or sometimes even till 1 am. And then, the next day, you have report back again at 6:30. After first two days, we became habituated to it. That combines with rounds after rounds of group discussions and interviews. I knew students who attended 15 group discussions in a day. I hit an upper circuit of 9 on my second day. 7-8 was a norm for everyone.

Once the summers were over, we celebrated Diwali. And oh!! it was fun. The food was although, the regular mess food (looked like that), but was served nicely in the L^2. Then there were fire crackers too. Lots of pictures. I took at least 250. After Diwali, in less than a week, we had mid-sems. The week after, we had quizzes. These were followed by submissions of all sorts. In a matter of few days. And then the end terms. All this in less than 25 days in all. At IIT Madras, comparatively, you would move from quiz 1 to quiz 2 in the same time period. And probably first drafts of submissions.

I am happy that it is over. Whether or not I survived it well, I would come to know later (when the grades are out). I am at home. Relaxing. And although it has been a week, it seems that I have spent over a month here. That is how my sense of passage of time has been distorted.