First Day at College

2023-08-04 #casual

So, I joined MM Deemed University, Mullana, Ambala for Bachelors in Technology in Computer Science.

Hostel

We got an AC hostel with centralised air conditioning, which includes all the bill of air conditioning as there is no individual switch or billing. Though there is a switch outside the room for letting the air conditioning not happen in our room.

My room-mate is a nice and hospitable person. We both have our differences of lifestyle and views about studies an all, but yeah he said just be comfortable and say anything if doesn't seem good to me. He is kind of a person with "system" (north Indians would only get this), so seems nice. Though he looked introverted in front of his parents and my parents when we took the room but he showed his true colours later in the evening when they left.

Expectations

I didn't expect much from the college or university, probably because I underestimated the university. The advertising that Chitkara University, Rajpura or Chandigarh Group of Colleges, Mohali do is significantly noticeable across social media. MMDU Mullana doesn't do any significant advertising on Instagram or using SMS spamming. Rather they have limited videos on YouTube regarding advertising and minimal sized boards across the cities in Haryana (which doesn't even include the features of university, just lists the NAAC grade and contact information).

The advantage less advertising gets is there is controlled amount of students here and not overflowing like CGC or Chitkara.

Campus

Overall campus is nice and it also has got nice things like a big ass air conditioned library where you can even stay at night and two-three shop complexes within the university premises, along with Dominos and bank branches of two nationalised banks and two private banks (namely Punjab National Bank, State Bank of India, ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank). There is basically no need to go outside of campus as even things like grocery, stationery and daily use items are easily available in the complexes near hostels only.

Lectures

In the first two hours in college, we mostly did stuff like registration and documents and basic details and also got provided a schedule for a 7-day induction program to get to know about departments, teachers, our course and also about the university.

The next lecture was of Keerti Mehra Ma'am, who is from the placement cell, specifically in the communications department. She told us that there are special classes for communication skills (starting from second year). She did a basic introduction and then later played 3 games (each weighing a total of 20 minutes)

The first game that we played was titled "Chinese whisper", where she first asked for volunteers. I volunteered. The game was quiet basic, she whispered some sentence in one of volunteers' ear and the volunteer this had to pass it again via whispering in ear to next volunteer until we reach the end. At the end the sentence and the information all got damaged and lost. The end result came out to be random two words, and in last she revealed the initial sentence which was like 1-2 lines long. Thus, activity highlighted the communication barriers, and importance of listening skills, so we get the right information across and through.

The second activity we did was "Zib zab Zob". The participants had to form a circle and stand there and the teacher started with pointing to one of student. The chosen student has to start with speaking "Zib" and point towards any other student in circle simultaneously. The next person has to do "zab" and point towards any other person and then the next person does "zob" and points to another person. This goes on, until one of the participant breaks the "zib zab zob" flow, or takes more than 1 second to respond, or forgets to do one of zib-zab-zob or pointing the finger. She conducted this activity in multiple sets of students in class, and got the finalists and ultimately the activity was conducted for finalists to get a final winner. This activity was majorly there to highlight the importance of simultaneous use of mind and body, and how body-mind co-ordination should work in areas requiring extreme focus.

Next some lectures were majorly blank with no teacher coming to class, even though we were assigned a schedule with teachers.

One lecture was visit to different departments and blocks concerning the engineering students, including Physics, Chemistry, Computer labs.

The last lecture was taken by a Mathematics professor. He took a brief 5 minutes to explain a little about what we would be studying in Engineering Mathematics in this year. But, after this he shifted to introducing himself, and then later introduction of students. Everyone was asked to give a brief introduction about themselves, especially including details like 'what is your branch in engineering and why specifically that?'. I expected that most people wouldn't have an idea what would they say in 'why' part. Things happened as expected. 75 percent of students, who opted for CSE gave answers like "my father said to do it", "good placements". I, like always, took the maximum time possible to give my best inroduction and included stuff like "I was always fascinated by logics and have been interested in programming since 7th grade (not formally though, but in diverse ways like block programming like Scratch ans stuff). Apart from that I have been contributing to open-source projects recently. So, yeah that is why it's my field of interest."

Crowd

I made a friend and a few aquaintances, who seemed like decent people. One thing I didn't really like was the lack of diversity. Even though there are numerous Africans, NRI's in the university; but there are none of them in our class and there would be rare ones in Btech CSE courses. Though, there are 5-6 Nepalese citizens in the class, they mostly blend in with us and also know Hindi. Apart from international diversity, there is even shortage of national diversity. Though there 2-3 students from Bihar and Himachal, other than that the entire majority is from Haryana only; with no students from neighbouring states of Punjab and Rajasthan.

Apart from the class crowd, the campus crowd is internationally diverse, with students from numerous countries in Indian sub-continent and African continent. National crowd is still sparsely diverse, as most crowd is from Haryana only.

The quality of crowd varies as there are all personalities of students coming. Some nerds, some very shy and quiet, some aggressively extrovert. I still look forward for finding crowd which can suit me. It is not like I don't have decent people here in my class, but I long for more decent and meaningful connections.