#272 The Disadvantages of an Elite Education [Guest Blog]

Our best universities have forgotten that the reason they exist is to make minds, not careers…

A friend passed the link to this article to me the other day and I found it one of the best articles I have ever read. At more than a few places I could feel what the author is trying to convey. I have my own points on the differences I have seen in students graduating from an elite institute, compared to those from local institutes and the difference is stark and contrary to popular assumptions, and is in sync with the author’s thoughts below. Here is the article reproduced as is from The American Scholar

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education

By William Deresiewicz

It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League degrees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. “Ivy retardation,” a friend of mine calls this. I could carry on conversations with people from other countries, in other languages, but I couldn’t talk to the man who was standing in my own house.

It’s not surprising that it took me so long to discover the extent of my miseducation, because the last thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy. As two dozen years at Yale and Columbia have shown me, elite colleges relentlessly encourage their students to flatter themselves for being there, and for what being there can do for them. The advantages of an elite education are indeed undeniable. You learn to think, at least in certain ways, and you make the contacts needed to launch yourself into a life rich in all of society’s most cherished rewards. To consider that while some opportunities are being created, others are being cancelled and that while some abilities are being developed, others are being crippled is, within this context, not only outrageous, but inconceivable.

#241 When his sleep was more important than someone’s life…

Bengal is perhaps the most non-violent yet violent state of India and perhaps the only state where the letter V stands for Bhaayolence! When an accident happens they will fold up their sleeves, shout and scream and curse and abuse, "Chherey De Bolchhi", but the last time someone actually hit someone was in 1947.

This was forwarded to me last month by a colleague and I was quick to forward it to people who I thought would be able to relate to it. The above paragraph is just a part of the bigger picture: ‘पिक्चर तो अभी बाकी है मेरे दोस्त’. Having stayed in Bengal for almost four years, some harsh realities came to my realisation. Initially I though it was just another very poor state of India, but much to my surprise I found that it was perhaps a place with unlimited potential to improve itself.

#180 Load characteristics of an average IITian

I had to change the title of my post after a lot of complaining comments :( I hope I am not misleading my readers any more :(

Here I would like to present, to the delight or the headache of most of my friends, the Load Characteristics of an average student at IIT Kharagpur.

‘Load‘ is the measure of weight borne for a trouble or a difficult concern. It is normally used in sentences such as…
“Abbe tu exam ka load kyun le raha hai?”
“Abbe tere life mein bandi (gf) ka load chal raha hai kya?”

Normally it is measured in indefinite nouns such as…
“Hoohaa Peace” = Absoultely no load
“Peace” = No load
“Load” = Nominal load
“Hoohaa Load” = Major load

At times, some people become ‘load’ benchmarks. Lets say if there is this girl called “Dipika” (name and sex changed for privacy) who is well known for taking ‘load’ on most trivial matters… then load can be quantified in terms of ‘Dipika’…
1 Dipika
10 Dipikas
1/2 Dipika, etc

The few loads commonly experienced by all students on this campus are:
Academic Load
Hall (hostel) Load
and Future Load (Job / CAT / GRE)

There are many other loads which are not really experienced by everyone in general. Those may be:
Bandi Load,
Project Guide Load,
Exam Passing or SQ Load,
Irritating Room-mates Load, etc.

All these loads lead to a common result, Frustration.
When a guy is ‘loaded’ with Frustration, he gets ‘frust‘.

I have just made a little graph to show the common tendencies. Orange, Blue, and Green are respectively Academic, Hall and Future Loads. At the top of them is the Black line showing Frustration levels. These graphs are plotted as functions of time.

Key observations:
Orange: Check out the spikes… the small ones and the big ones
Green: The huge drop after the tallest peak…
Black: Ever increasing…

Is this the same for an average engineer as well?

#174 Grand Bhaiba

So it was the oral examination… or the GRAND VIVA of all that I have learnt as a student of Electrical Engineering.

Since the first semester, almost every semester we had a subject of the department where we had to attend a 3 hour lab per week. At the end of the lab course they would invariably take a viva and a lab test. Sometimes even at the beginning of the experiments they would take sort of mini vivas. In many of those, books flew, sheets were thrown out, F grades given, or students asked to go back to their rooms and prepare themselves for the viva before performing the DANGEROUS experiments. Our seniors used to tell us that the profs would throw the sheets out of the lab and would ask the student to “follow the trajectory”. Fortunately nothing like that happened with me.

This time it was the Grand Viva… supposedly the last Viva I’d be facing as an undergraduate student.

They tried to ask me a few questions and I tried to answer fewer. Fortunately or unfortunately, it wasnt anything like I had heard it to be. It was not by any means a grueling experience. It was calm, composed and in an air conditioned room! The professors were cool and while we were thinking about the questions they were busy discussing about pens, food, countries (note: USA, Japan and Korea). They also offered us sweet, aloo pakoda (common name: chop)… All in all it was a very different sort of viva for me, where I was guilty that I cudn’t answer much, but I dint feel that uncomfortable.

The fact that it is over now, is what keeps me happy. :)

The next few days, I shall be a bit busy… and I really don’t know when next I would blog after this. A lot of things to look forward to.

I’ve been updating my site lately to major extent and testing a new blog on another host. Keeping my fingers crossed till then.