What have I done???


I am an engineering 3rd year student. I have learnt a lot of new things since I was in 12th standard and I took admission in engineering course, but have I learnt as much as I was supposed to?...I think I haven’t and most of the people like me would bear a coincidence of thought with me. Is this my fault? May be it is, but is it my fault alone? Am I the only one to be held responsible for? Most of the people related to field of teaching, holding orthodox thoughts of seventies would say, yes, you are. But many of my friends and those related to the field of learning would say, I am not or rather they would say, we are not. Many people who have no idea about engineering education in India would be confused about my statement, so let me clarify it for them.
What most of the graduation students do during the course of their semesters is watching movies, gossip with friends, fancying around and sleeping more than eight hours a day, I am not talking about studious guys and toppers, they have their own routine to follow, but the big question is how many are toppers in a class of sixty, there are four or five or may be six at most. Is this figure satisfactory for a country holding population more than thousand millions?...I think it is not and everyone would say the same unless he holds an extraordinary vision of optimism and a patience to wait for next thousand years to match European countries. Our honorable ex-president Mr. A P J Abdul Kalam says, it is a crime to have a low ambition, so isn’t it a crime to be ready to lag behind others for thousand years if we have the capacity and resources to lead them. Now, coming back to the big question, why other students like me waste time in worthless activities, may be because they find the education too boring or may be the case is that the people teaching us make it horrible. We have foreign visiting faculty at our college every now and then and they talk of making education interactive and interesting but that never happened. All of us know that there is a shortage of faculty at colleges all over the country but no one talks about the quality of that present. Aren’t they playing with the educational front of the students? Being a computer science student, I talk of CSE curriculum, we had object oriented programming in our 4th semester, we were supposed to study C++ and JAVA languages in one semester, which lasted for just four months, and if I make a count of working days, it would not be more than 90-100 days at most. Is this period sufficient to train someone to be a software engineer, the most funny part of the story is that the faculty coming to our class for the first time to take the subject is saying himself that it is not possible to complete the subject in a semester, what am I supposed to perceive from this statement, shouldn’t I feel cheated? I don’t know all of the programming basics but still I come triumphant by scoring a 10 points in the paper, how do I do this?I have got 15-20 programs to mug up and vomit on the paper, isn’t it easy to become a 10 pointer in the subject, let me tell you the height of our concept regarding the subject, one of my friend was writing his semester exam and he forgot a few lines of the program and thus asked his fellow saving teacher’s eye the coding at that place, his friend was perhaps a brighter student and thus told him the procedure to get the code and not the exact code, unfortunately my friend was not eligible enough to go through the procedure explained and so asked again for the exact code, since it was a C++ practical paper, his friend told him to call a particular function from the base class into the main function to get the code but again my dear friend was having no idea what his friend was talking and thus he could not write the code with his friend’s help, may be he would have fetched someone else’s assistance afterwards but was not having anything for his kind friend except a few nice words lying on the left side of the number line. It’s not the story of my friend alone but it’s the most common case in our field. When my seniors go for their placement aptitude tests and interviews they come and ask us for the basic books of languages.
Let me tell you one more interesting phenomena of the placements at our college, recently a company of international repute visited our college, I am not mentioning the name here as it can be taken as an offence towards the selection process of the company, the company is basically a software solution provider, in the aptitude test of the company students of almost every branch appeared, but only 30 students from CSE got selected and 20 from IT, 100+ from ECE,50+ MECH and so on. Isn’t it surprising that a software based company is taking minimum input from the software courses, some people argue that the deficiency is in CSE and IT students, I have a question for people saying this, we know that most of the top rankers of the entrance exams of colleges opt for CSE and IT and of course ECE ,so is it believe worthy that the toppers turned losers in three years and most of them did, and those who were inferior to them three years before are now superior, I am unable to understand the reason behind this or may be the case is that the company is not interested in taking too much software students may be it is their own strategy, I don’t have the privilege to question that, but let me reveal one more interesting observation, most of the 9 pointers were unable to crack the aptitude test and most of the 7 pointers did it.
Now, I think I have made my point. Now the teachers who were there to blame me for my failure in learning all possible concepts tell me why their favorites, who remained 9 pointers throughout have failed and those who were so called average guys have succeeded, tell me if they have the answers.
This all makes me feel, did I do the right thing in remaining a student somewhere in between a topper and an average student, I cannot be called an all-time topper neither I am an average student, I am not on either of the sides, this sometimes makes me feel insecure, a famous saying is that be the best in all the affairs you are involved…unfortunately I am not…did I do the right thing…this makes me ask myself sometimes…WHAT HAVE I DONE???