ms-student

Fri Dec 22, 2006 7:31 pm

Stood for a long time at the Cafeteria today wondering what to eat. Was too hungry for a pizza slice, was not too hungry for a taco salad. Took two pizza slices then. Was alright, not as good as apna Smokin Joes or Dominos.

Cafeteria Rates for Pizza:
1. Cheese - 2.20
2. Tomato & Basil - 2.40
3. Mixed Vegetables - 2.60
4. Barrito: 5odd$
5. Taco Salad: 6odd$

See Taco Salad:
http://www.tacotico.com/images/prod_tacosalad.jpg
See Barrito: http://www.coles.com.au/images/cmi/library/recipe/large/mini_burrito_burgers.jpg

They keep a big pizza on a platter and you can select the biggest size. I wonder who takes the last slice. It has to be the smallest Smile

Pizza made me thirsty so again stood for a long time looking at choices:
1. Vitamin Water
2. Gold's Iced Tea
3. Minutemaid Juice

All for approximately 2$ each.

Walked to the drinking fountain and had water!

I had a cheesecake at Cheese Cake Factory here at Barnes and Nobles. It was for 3.95, 4.15 with tax. Not too big or anything, but WHAT AWESOME CAKE! Cheese cake is heaven. When I was eating it, I told my 'frand' - this is how life should be. Good books and cheesecake Smile

People eat all the good things you can while in India. Dine in the finest places, eat the best food without worrying how expensive it is. Eating out is too expensive here.

Wed Dec 20, 2006 4:36 pm

One semster over.

Ice skating. Looking for good deals on skates already. Yaay.

Also got a new camera. Got, not bought.

Well somebody got a free HP Camera and decided, lets give it to this kid, a new camera should make her very happy, should make her fall in love with the world all over again. HPM527. Not like CanonS3IS. Not the bestest camera to have, but wait it is a cameraaaa Smile Yaay yaay. Life is good.

Fri Dec 15, 2006 5:26 am

This SSN thing is crazy. You cannot apply for an SSN if you are on the payroll. You cannot be on the payroll unless you have an SSN. Ofcourse there is a catch. You can be on the payroll for a while without an SSN, apply for an SSN and then present the number to the payroll office. Clock skew application in real life. Clock skew isn't always bad.

Changed buses and went to neighbouring gaon again to apply for a friends SSN. Today was a bright, sunny, beautiful day. Wasted a lot of time sitting by the campus pond and watching the geese land. So there were three types of birds - ducks, geese and gulls. So much chaos. Also fed some cookie bits to squirrels. Squirrels here are very plump and cute. And greedy. They love cookies.

Finals are nearly here, everybody has severely bitten nails. Meanwhile everybody's parents are on a visa application spree. Looks like they're handing out 10 year multiples like chana futana in Bombay. People, tell your parents that it is a good time to apply. My mom applied too. She met a girl who was going to SJSU and was waiting to collect her passport. Do you know Edulix, mom asked. Girl knew. Yaay. Girl, you spoke to Evenstar's mom, hehe heh.

Have to study, bye.

Mon Dec 11, 2006 2:42 am

yesterday i had my first glass of anything alcoholic. it was wine. red wine. it looks good, good to take pictures of. and good to watch people drink. but it tastes like kadu medicine. soon i was in the bathroom throwing up. it was yuck. had some good old gatorade to wash that taste off.

say lfa, how do you drink that stuff? i'd rather have glycodin. everybody said i had to develop a taste for it. i don't understand people. they crib about peanut butter tasting yuck, but have wine so easily.

atleast next time i say no i don't drink, i'm not being the she-doesn't-drink kind of good girl. she hates that stuff so she doesn't drink sounds so convincing. and nobody would press me on after i mention the big throwing up incident. whoever wants a pukey wash basin. hehe.

yaar meri bhi life rone wali ho gayi hei. these profs here are slave drivers. i don't feel like studying at all, esp after skating, my mind is always in the rink. i wish i could jut skip two weeks ahead and not have the exams at all.

Mon Dec 11, 2006 1:57 am
there are no beaches close to my school. on grey day i wish i had ben in uc santa cruz. besides feeling at home {santacruz is a place in bombay too}, imagine having palm trees on campus? but i'm not complaining. fall is beautiful and is worth facing a tough winter. or maybe not. the other day it was so cold and windy {-6C}, i could barely walk. i almost sat down on the ground and gave up rather than battling against the cold wind. oh, the elements! and it hasn't even officially snowed yet. the snow in my last post was just flurries.... anticlimax na.

i won't be posting much for the rest of the semester. i'm not doing as well as i had expected in a course, and i'm soo worried about not getting a good grade. today i am feeling exceptionally guilty because last evening i went ice skating. it was a free ice skating night, yes FREE. so ofcourse there had to be a queue to get in.

i created a big big fuss about the right skate size, exchanged my skates three times to get the right one. surprisingly the person handing out the skates wasn't annoyed at all. ice skates are not like our india ka skates which we used in summer vacations. these are more like roller blades, so that they cut through the ice i guess. but they aren't really sharp blades either, just thin enough to cut through the ice and just thick enough to balance on...

so while we were waiting for our chance to come, we watched the figure skaters right in the center performing really beautifully. it was breathtaking. they were surrounded by ordinary people skating in circles, round and round and round expressionlessly as we stood with our faces stuck on the glass watching the activity inside. and then there were the newbies, holding on to the rails and learning how to ice skate. i knew quite a few of the newbies (is there an unsaid rule that says engineers cannot skate?) because we were in common classes. some of them even fell while holding the rails. i soo felt like laughing, but i knew that in a few minutes i would be there too, falling and making a big big fool of myself.

so when our chance came to go in, i was all ready to fall, but surprisingly i could stand quite well on those, and drag my feet as i clutched the railing for dear life and dignity. but no - i didn't fall even once. and i don't say this to save face. slowly i could skate and not just drag my feet although staying in grasping distance of the railing. so i took THREE full rounds in 10 minutes, {we went in so late that we got just so much time before the rink closed}.

came out feeling rather overjoyed about having found a new passion, ice skating, yaay. and its free always as long as you get your own skates. i'm already looking for deals on skates online Smile Smile

but right now i am feeling so terribly guilty about having wasted all that time yesterday. and yet another part of me thinks i did just the right thing. it was time well wasted. oops. well spent.

Fri Dec 08, 2006 6:26 pm

About partying?

I go for birdday parties. There is atleast a birthday a week, and december seems to be birthday season, with sometimes two birthdays a week.

Its so much fun to go to a birthday party, sing happy birdday aloud, have some chocolate cake, chips, big Y soda, watch the poor guy get birthday bumps. Its such a rut!! I'm sick of birthday parties and all the fake-fake enthu, when everybody knows everybody is there just for the cake, or so that birthday boy/girl doesn't feel bad about them not coming.

These days I don't even go because its too cold to go out just for some cake! Ok, sometimes you really know that person well, and care about him/her and all, but usually its just somebody you met in the bus and say hey, twice, or maybe thrice.

Its so standard with birthdays - cake, chips, soda. Its kind of depressing. Thats the reason why I can totally appreciate the way LFA celebrated his birdday!! Man, awesome food, i checked out pictures on orkut...!

Thu Dec 07, 2006 8:07 pm

ok ok here's the big news:

i bought myself a laptop. Sony Vaio Intel Core Duo 1.66 1GB Ram, 80 GB hdd, dvd writer. 700$. I'm so happy. I have upgraded from a P4 Dell Inspiron 4500, and boy, that was a seriously steep update. I have friends telling me, I could have found a Core 2 Duo, with graphics card and 120 gb hdd and an integrated webcam and all those fancy features. But no, not a Vaio, quite a looker this lappie is Smile

Here we have to look for deals for everything. You may buy yourself a really good jacket for 25$, and before you know it, next week its on a clearance sale at 75% off in the same shop on the same shelf. You can return your 25$ jacket and buy the same one for $6.25, provided the label is still intact {sometimes they don't even care about that}

The same goes for notebooks too, you have to keep looking for good deals. Now that I have bought a notebook, I thought I'd save all that time I would spend looking at deals online each day, but HELP! I am addicted to looking for deals now. Btw, Black Friday is soo overrated {Black Friday is the thanksgiving Friday where you get 'good deals' on electronics. People stand in queues outside stores like Best Buy & Circuit City all night long to get THAT deal}..... So like I was saying, Black Friday is soo overrated. A friend of mine bought the same notebook as I did, but with 512GB Ram for a higher price. But again, maybe I am generalizing...

To get my notebook I had to change three buses to go to Holyoke Mall. This was an INSTORE deal, so I couldn't order it online. I had to get out of Amherst, go to Hadley {neighbouring gaon - village}, go to Northampton and then to Holyoke {all gaons}. I left at 1:30 and returned at 8 at night! I thought I had traveled really far and all, until I looked it up on google maps, and it was just 32 miles, 25 minutes by car!

But the bus rides were fun, I got to interact with a lot of normal junta, not just university kids. And got to see a whole lot too. America isn't really all rich and prosperous as you might believe. Maybe it is, but contrasts like in Bombay exist everywhere. I saw neighbourhoods which had chawl like buildings, clothes hanging on lines outside, windows boarded up, a lot of tiny houses on each floor. And just a little distance ahead I saw big houses with lawns outside, and Christmas lights. They even had reindeer made out of lights on the lawn, it was so pretty, but so contrasting with the houses I saw like 2 minutes back, I was taken aback...

I was chatting with a 46 year old man on the bus, who for some reason thought I was Italian. When I told him I am from India, he asked me how did I know English?! I had to tell him that we are taught English in school, and all our books are in English too. Then there were people who came up and started speaking to me right in Spanish. I learnt a phrase from the bus driver {who was Spanish} and said Ne Hable Espaniol {said as - Naaable Espaniol} meaning I don't speak Spanish. Maybe you have heard this countless times before but one thing I like about this place is that there is a lot of dignity of labour here. You could be a bus driver and marry a girl living in the reindeer-lights-house without people going WTF. So whenever somebody tells me next - America has no culture, maybe I should talk about the work culture here! Its awesome and something we need to take back home.

This mall was like 10x bigger than the mall we have closer to school. Ok now since we have malls all over India, maybe you all know what malls are like, but for those who don't...

A mall is like a big spread out building with many many shops inside it. Usually it is 2 floors or such. So you could have Shoppers Stop, Globus, Lee, Levis, Nike, Reebok, Mc Donalds, Barista all in different different shops inside the mall. Whatever you buy at each shop, you have to pay for it there itself, there is no centralised place where you have to go to pay for your purchases.

So here the common names inside a mall are - Sears, JC Penney, Old Navy, Aeropostale, American Eagle, Yankee Candles, Subway, SomeCoffeeStore, SomeChineseFoodShop, Some IndianFoodShop, SomeGreekFoodShop, SomeCoffeeShop and so on...

There are salesmen here too, who try to make you buy useless things. They don't have shops like the ones above, but just small stalls {bakda} in the middle of the corridor with shops on both sides... Some salesman tries selling me bunny slippers for 20$. Ok, I nearly fell for those bunny slippers because they were so cute, but then realised, they are so expensive. I was talked into trying stupid things like a hot/cold collar for spondilitis {spell?}!

I nearly got lost inside the mall, and had to ask somebody for directions to go out. Overall, more than the laptop, I enjoyed the experience of going out so far away by myself, that scary feeling of going too far away from home and getting lost, that independence of being able to do as I please, those small sights all along the way, the small conversations with random strangers, the joy as the bus crossed the connecticut river, the feeling of coming home as the bus took a left into my apartment complex that I loved. And ofcourse my lappie. I'm thinking of a good name for it...

Tue Dec 05, 2006 9:02 pm

I woke up to my radio clock this morning, put it on snooze and woke up again. I then pulled up the blinds to a new world. A fairyland. Tiny white snowflakes danced in the air, and gently fell to the ground. With a gust of wind, they all started blowing in different directions and then resumed their slow downward fall. Like tiny ballerina's in Tutu's dancing to a song, a song of happiness.

It was surprisingly warm when I opened the door. My mind told me it would be warm, when the rain turns into snow, it gives off latent heat. My heart called my mind a geek, and intuitively and slowly said it will be cold. Mind won over heart as I stepped outside barefeet. The snow had covered the asphalt path. I walked a few steps leaving footprints in a layer so smooth, I almost felt bad. I then tried making some handprints too, much to the amusement of the handyman who was going to my neighboring house to fix a window. I went to school in the bus, didn't get place to sit, so stood by the window, back towards everybody watching the snow covering the landscape. In class, I did not hear a word because my seat afforded me a glimpse of the door and the snow outside.

Have you ever opened your fridge in the non frost free days and scraped the ice of the freezer roof? Made tiny lumps out of it and let them melt in your mouth as you hurriedly closed the door before your mother caught you eating ice again? Thats exactly what it felt like when I lifted a small piece off an evergreen and put it in my mouth. A chinese girl laughed as she walked by. I smiled back a little embarassed but picking up more snow already for the next bite. Maybe she had done the same thing the year she came here. The old lady at my workplace saw me too when I sneaked out of work to eat snow. She said snowflakes are formed on dust, so maybe it isn't a good idea to eat snowflakes. But she had eaten snowflakes as a child, and she was alive, she said.

It then stopped snowing for a while, and the sun showed itself. The ballerina's melted under its touch.I wonder what happens to a snowflake when it melts. Does it die? Do snowflakes die?

Sun Nov 19, 2006 9:09 am

So I was studying in an isolated peaceful lounge at 10 on a Friday night. The lounge has no visible cameras, and i had left my cell phone at home. This guy comes in wearing latex gloves and has a huge syringe in his hand. Supp, girl, why aren't you partying on a saturday night, he asks. I'm trying my best to hold normal conversation, maintaining eye contact all along. I have midterms early next week, I say, trying my best not to look at the syringe. You should party, I always see you studying, he says.

me - Umm... are you here to study too?
him - laughs a loud loud laugh and says no, i'm from the physical plant, i shut down this place.
me - ioh, ok. ts 10, if i moved out now, would you shut it down?
him - i guess so *smiles*
me - *smile back* i'm done with my work, i was just about to leave
him - alrightyyy

I hurriedly put my books in my backpack, stuff in the loose sheets and nearly tiptoe to the exit.

him - excuse me

i freeze, not knowing what to expect, fight or flight having a massive quarrel in my head, but i turn ready to face him. you forgot your jacket, you might catch a cold *giggles*

me -uh, thanks, bye, have a good night.

weird huh, scary i tell you. maybe he was from the physical plant, latex gloves to empty the trash i guess. but syringe. freaky !!

my school is quite safe waise, there is a lot of police on thursday, friday and saturday nights - yes partying begins thursday nights here. drunk students everywhere, passing out in the bus. its ewww.

Thu Nov 09, 2006 4:40 pm

news is that my laptop's adaptor (too lazy to spell check) burnt down. yes - it melted. i will be buying a slick new laptop this thanksgiving. but heard that its just like bombay in the stores here on thanksgiving....

you might get a 1400$ lappy for 700$. But you have to go pick it up real fast, and nobody gives a damn about good manners and all. people shove, steal from your cart, run their carts over your feet to make it to the checkout first, and lots of other things. it seems to be a stressful situation and i'm in a good mind to avoid it, but what the heck, lappy ke liye kuch bhi karega!

meanwhile FALL has become FELL now {another sad joke} - the leaves have all fallen, and to think about it i like it more this way. the bare trees look loverly loverly against a grey sky.

and its kind of cool to see queues here. especially at the coffee shops on campus, sleepy looking student stand in a line to get their daily dose of coffee.

i think there is a u-bug which bites people on friday nights, and injects party-potion into them which stays active till sunday. drunk people in the bus, drunk people on the grass, drunk people like all over. yelling, uttering bullshit, but staying within limits because of the university police which patrols heavily on thursdays, fridays and saturdays. yeah partying begins thursday nights Smile but it really is no big deal. nobody bothers anybody.

coffee here is mostly cold yaar. there's Rao's coffee (not Raao but Ray-o) which is very good, but in the cafeteria its nearly always luke warm, never hot...

thanksgiving plans are in the making, but looks like i'm going to be whiling away time catching up on my labs, and ofcourse BLACK FRIDAY DEALS FOR LAPTOPS!! americans believe in spending thanksgiving with family, so since this is a college town, most of them would be heading back to boston or wherever. GOOD > less crowd at bestbuy. hehe - hopefully.

i majorly miss my edulix friends from bombay, and really wish we had met once again before we left. i did make some lab-friends here. we generally horse around on nights we have to stay over and all that banter keeps us awake and cheerful. Smile

Mon Oct 16, 2006 11:49 pm

Originality is valued in the US, they said. Original non-text book answers will fetch you a B Grade. Teaching in the US is awesome. Slide shows is what we have for every lecture. Same slides since the last how many years. Four hours of sleep, one meal a day is what you will have. You will shiver in the cold at the bus stop and cry for the bus to come soon. You will fight with the ones closest to you because they demand your time and attention. You will stay over at night in the lab, sleep in a public lounge, and go for class the next day. You will wonder how different things were back home, and how your mother would have to ask you to have a cooked, ready, hot dinner and yet you would say 'later ma', as you long for a good meal. You will think about the days when you slept for eight whole hours and thought why not ten. You will struggle to find time for your hobbies. It will be two years until you read your next book or watch a new movie. You may have the money but never the time to buy a camera. And if you do, you will never have the time to photograph. Maybe because you will stop looking at things. And you will realise this when you stand at the bus stop one day and wonder, when did these leaves change from green to fiery orange, and when did they fall? MS in the US is overrated. Here I am, leading an ordinary life like so many ms-students before me, I'm not the next William Shockley, I shall complete my homework, or struggle to complete it on time, struggle to complete my lab using tools I have never used before. I shall struggle to keep up, to wake up each morning, run to catch the bus, miss it and sit on the thinking rock and cry. Cry out of frustration, out of anger directed inwards, out of sheer lack of sleep. I am not going back to India this summer. Not this, not the next. Because I know if I go I wouldn't want to come back. There is no veil of uncertainty now, I know what I have here, and what I have left behind.

Disclaimer: Not meant to discourage student. Just some facts from a real life ms-student. Ofcourse different people lead different lifes and lifestyles. This is ME, it may not be YOU or your friend in so&so school.

Don't kill me for writing this.

Sat Sep 09, 2006 3:04 am

Suddenly this place is full of students. Its almost like how they show it in movies. Princess Diaries like. Girls here dress very smart, and most guys wear those long shorts with a lot of pockets - almost like a uniform. On cold days everybody wears hoodies with Umass, Amherst, Abercrombie, Navy mostly written on them. Maroon is our color, so a lot of maroon hoodies around. There are a lot of skateboarders, and a lot of signs around the buildings saying NO SKATEBOARDING.

It gets a little cold sometimes, and the sun here looks as mild as the moon when it does show up through the clouds. But when the sun is out, people happy and a lot of people go jogging. I have begun to appreciate the sun too, and coming from Bombay its a significant change Smile

All professors over here are not necessarily great. I attended a boring class finally and then knew exactly which course to drop. But maybe I have been evaluating it incorrectly because I was tired from two previous classes the same day. There were ofcourse conflicting opinions, some people liked the lecture a whole lot.

Oh by the way, here the cool deal is that you can attend classes for a week or so and drop them if you dont like them before the drop date. For undergrads sometimes the scene is even better. They get to stay on until the first test, and can leave the class if they feel their test performance is not satisfactory.

I finally managed to find myself an on-campus library job which pays 7.75$ per hour. I get to work for 8 hours a week at the helpdesk. Its less, but most campus jobs around here pay around that much or sometimes even 7$. Some people still haven't found any campus jobs, they look pretty sad when you meet them at the bus stop, always wondering where should we apply now. The people who got a job at the cafeteria often complain about having to stand all day long.

Speaking about bus-stops reminds me that buses over here can get very crowded too. People here are pretty big on having their space and will not budge until the bus driver requests them to. Bus drivers over here are students (they get paid $10 an hour). Today the girl driving the bus requested everybody to take their backpacks off to create more space. And still many students had to miss the bus and wait for the next one which comes after 15 minutes.

Students crossing the roads at zebra crossings slow down traffic and create long traffic jams. Buses go off schedule. But looks like there is no way out of it. I feel a little wary while crossing roads knowing I might be holding up traffic.

Tomorrow is the first weekend after classes have begun. I plan to wake up at 11, cook a good meal and clean the house. And hmm, study a little too. Have lots of things to read up on.

Have a great weekend, Have a good night! - thats how they talk here!!

Wed Sep 06, 2006 8:29 pm

Ok photonics, here's my update:

today was my first lecture. i reached the place 15 minutes early and sat on a chair that went round round. luckily i was back in a normal chair when the prof came in with some students. my lecture was on semiconductor devices. the professor started off by telling us the difference between classical and quantum physics. and then suddenly it was over. haha, what did you expect in a 50 minute class. shuru hone ke pehle khatam {it got over before it started}.

profs here look at the clock and start the lecture. even if they come early, they wait until its time to start. but surprisingly they dont have to keep looking at the clock throughout the lecture, they just *know* when its time to end {im really amazed}. did i add, the teaching is AWESOME.

classrooms over here are big, spacious and airy. they have chairs with attached tables to the right {dont know what you call them}. a big green board, and a projector. i think the classrooms are very carefully made, because even when the prof was speaking not so quite loudly, he could be heard. but what i liked here is that these classes had some chairs with tables on the left too. its really good for left handed people.

today i saw a squirrel and a chipmunk and could appreciate the difference between the two. chipmunks are smaller and orangey-orangey. squirrels are big and greedy.

Wed Sep 06, 2006 1:36 pm

I have heard about this laundry business from all grad-students i know...but not one of them have told me why aren't we allowed to wash our clothes like we do back here in hostel/home the "indian way" and dry them somewhere on a rope?

I don't know about other states, but here we don't do that, because its always cloudy. I haven't seen the sun in days now, its always behind the clouds. Back in Bombay, I always thought the sun struggled to come out, here the sun doesn't even seem to try Sad

AND nobody likes to see clothes drying near the bathtub on miserable hangers and falling into the tub every now and then. But sahi mein yaar, why have a bathtub when nobodys ever going to take relaxed bubble baths and bs. I wish we just had a shower, less area to clean!

Ok, I hate getting into dirty details, but no jet sprays here, just paper towels. We bought a nice lotha which really is a watering can, hahahaha. Embarassed

Another funny thing about the place I live in is that there are no locks on bathroom doors. But that is because, this is Zoomass, and people supposedly have wild parties and lock themselves in. Good solution na - no locks. Free for the world to see, unless you announce REALLY loudly that you're using the loo.

Today is my first class, and I have chewed my thumbnail into half. Will let you all know how it goes.

Photonics, keep writing in whenever you have the time to. Love reading your stuff Smile

What I have learned -

Heating coffee for over 5 minutes doesn't only make it hot, it makes the milk overflow. On school days one cannot afford to clear such a mess.

Boiling eggs in the microwave is not a good idea. Eggs are different from potatoes and sometimes burst, creating another mess.

Check, always check if the knob is on 'shower' before opening the tap. Ice cold water on a cold morning - not good.

Never, I repeat never put a red top with a white top in the laundry.

Don't leave specs lying around waiting to be sat upon.

Don't rush to get into the bus or out of it. Relax. This is not Bombay. One can take the luxury of sitting in the bus until it stops.

Don't wait for cars to stop before you cross the road. YOU have the right of way. See a zebra crossing? Then cross.

Always carry a warm jacket and umbrella with you if you are in New England. Like the saying goes - If you don't like the weather in New England, just wait for a minute.

Don't convert while buying essentials. Forget the 45 times table you by-hearted.

Don't keep hugging a cat soft-toy in the mall for too long. Friends can get impatient.

While in a mall / walmart, get down to buying what you want without lingering around and wasting time.

Just before a class, STUDY - don't edulix.

Sat Sep 02, 2006 7:50 pm

I can proudly say my entire house is furnished off the dump. We got three twin beds, three study tables, a bookshelf, a shoeshelf, two plastic racks, a microwave, a humnidifier, an ironing board, three fans, a comfy chair, two small tables, a footon - ALL from the dump. We even got some utensils from a girl moving out. Sometimes me and my roomies wonder if its a good thing to get everything out of the dump. If I think hard, it even eeks me out at times. So what I have done is quit thinking about it - until I have the money to BUY stuff. But whatever I got is pretty good too, its clean and comfy!!

For food you need rice, dal, lots of frozen veggies, tomato puree (its sickly sweet) and maybe some fruits. Breakfast is a small peanut-butter jelly affair and plain milk without sugar. Now since we have a microwave I am indulging in coffee! Lunching out is expensive (2$ for a slice of pizza, 1.25 for a small coffee) at the cafeteria. It leaves me feeling hungry too, so no point eating out. I'm still undecided what to do about lunch once school starts, coming back home is an option, but I might go to sleep after a heavy lunch. So probably PBJ sandwiches for lunch too. Hehe, I love them!

Banking is simple. Go with a friend, open and account, deposit your cash/TCs/drafts and get a cool ATM Card. Figuring out currency here should be done immediately. When I reached Chicago airport, I went to exchange my 1$ note for quarters. Assuming you have to say 'uncle uncle chutta chahiye' here too, I asked for change to a girl aimlessly chewing gum at a donut shop on the airport. She just pointed at a box with a lot of change in it. Not wanting to look to gauti, I picked up four coins without looking at them in detail. Four cents is what I picked up, I discovered later!! My first loss in Amrika.

Laundry is fun, especially with friends. 20 minutes to wash, 50 minutes to dry, and clothes come out clean and smell so good. The thumb rule for laundry is - you have to go for laundry when you run out of undies to wear. But post laundry clothes get really crumpled. If you fold them right when they're warm, it might save you some boring ironing time.

I'm having fun living my own life, taking responsibility for all my actions. Its something I have always dreamed off. My parents miss me back home, and sometimes I feel guilty I don't miss home enough apart from when I wake up on grey mornings wondering where in the world am I!

November 19, 2006

Packaging Applications

This is easily one of the most important steps of sending your application. A well ordered application can sometimes make all the difference. I'm not saying that simply packaging your application well will you get you an admit from your dream school, but it sure will help in increasing your probability of getting into a school you already had a good chance of getting into.

What is an application packet?
So you have heard your seniors say, "I have to start sending my application packets soon", and you have always wondered what did that packet hold, afterall.

But, like, um, what goes into it?
Lets make a list of things an application packet should hold. This list may vary according to the requirements of the schools you are applying at. This list may also vary according to the kind of person you are. If you like sending in extra papers, just to be sure that you have sent everything - to get some peaceful sleep at night, or if you do not like burdening the already overburdened and understaffed admission offices of your probable schools.

*****

First and foremost - A cover letter.

Acads Related:
1. Transcripts
Sealed + Signed enevlope holding each set of attested transcripts.

2. Letters of Recommendation
Sealed + Signed Envelope holding each letter.

3. College Marksheets
Absolutely no need to include KT marksheets, if any.
Some may find sending marksheets to be redundant as you are sending the transcripts already.

4. Passing Certificates
The tiny white certificates you get after your FE & BE in Mumbai University. Don't worry if you haven't received the BE certificate yet.
Sealed + Signed enevlope holding each set of attested marksheets + passing certificates

5. Degree Certificate
Again, don't worry if you haven't yet received it.

Test Scores Related:

6. GRE Scoresheet

7. TOEFL Scoresheet

If there is a lag in score reporting, this will make sure that the school knows about your testscores already

Work Experience Related

8. A letter stating that you have been employed with the company, your duties and the duration of employment.

Finance Related:

9. Form provided by school stating financial standing, if provided online.

10. Affidavit of Support.

11. Bank Statement stating financial standing.

DO send 9 and 10 if explicitly asked, else it is your choice to send or not.

I-20 Related.

12. Copy of Passport
Yaay, so you got an admit from your dream school. But you are in a mess because they misspelt your name on the I-20. Don't let that happen. Let them know again what your full name is. Make sure you spell your name on the school forms exactly the same way as it is on your passport. And that the first and last names go into the right columns.

*****

[I shall be gradually uploading formats for some of the above documents when I have the time to]

Putting it all together:

Each of the above documents go into their own white envelope. The small white envelopes I am speaking about are size 10 envelopes, each costing around Rupee 1.

On each envelope, make sure you write your NetId, or any kind of identification provided to you when you applied online. If you are stapling things together, make sure you hit hard on the staple pins after stapling, to eliminate sharp edges. You don't want your application to hurt the one evaluating it.

And in what do all these envelopes go?

You might want to consider buying an expandable wallet to package your application in. An expandable wallet is also popularly known as a half harmonium folder. If you live in Bombay you can get these at Abdul Rehman Street, which is along Jumma Masjid's lane, opposite to Crawford Market. If you live in any other city, you might get it at a place which stocks office supplies.

This is what an expandable wallet looks like. They do come with their own glossy inserts on which you could neatly label what each part of the file contains. These inserts come free with the folder, but you might want to replace them with something you print out on hard cardpaper and cut to size. The reason I did not use the free inserts were:
1. They were too glossy, writing with a ballpen smudged them.
2. They did not fit correctly into the tiny plastic slot. They were smaller than the slot and kept moving down reducing their visibility.

Each wallet might cost you Rs 40-80 depending upon their quality. I bought my yellow and white pretty wallets for Rs 50 each. If you are applying to 10 schools, total cost goes up to Rs 400. If you have gone - what, Rs 400 more, I am broke! - relax. It is just a fraction of your application expenses.

If you think your application will look better and be organised better in an expanding wallet, make that trip to town to buy them. Buy atleast 10 at a time so that you don't have to go back when its peak application season and you are crushed for time. It will also save you some money to buy in bulk.

Final Packing
If you consider the expandable wallet option, or some other innovative option, make sure it all goes into a Manila Envlope. A manila envelope is the light green envelope with a jute interior.

Write the address on the envelope very clearly with a black marker. DOn't forget to include the return address.

Which courier service should I use?

This depends upon how early or late your application is. Make sure your application reaches before the deadline, and then decide which service to use. Popular courier services include:
1. DHL [Rs 937 for a packet under 500gm]
2. Fedex [please send in rates if you know for a packet weighing below 500gm]
3. UPS [please send in rates if you know for a packet weighing below 500gm]
4. TNT [Edulix has a deal with them, offering the lowest prices. Log on to Edulix to find more]
5. Apna EMS. Cheapest and supposedly quite reliable.
6. US Returning Aunty
7. Couriered in bulk to US based aunty [provided she's not a lazy woman who won't send your packets at all]

Some of these courier services have expensive overnight express options, which you might want to use if you are really late.

I would not ask you trust your applications with 6 and 7. Be in control, always.

Things to buy & Packaging Expenses

This assuming you are applying at 12 schools.

*****

I would advise you to apply early. Especially at schools which have rolling admission - they hand out admits and rejects as the applications come in, you have a better chance of getting through with an early application.

*****

If you do have any relevant questions, leave behind a comment and I can add it into the post for future readers.

November 18, 2006

SOP: To quote or not to quote.

The doubt plaguing my mind when I wrote my SOP was how to begin it. It was almost like nobody had anything good enough to say to begin their SOP and so they said something which a great person had said before.

I thought and thought, read many websites looking for a good quote, but often whether I should have a quote or not. I asked around. Opinions varied. My thoughts varied. I was left confused.

Writing things down makes them easier to analyse at times:

Quotes in your SOP
Is your quote required? A quick check box test -
[ ] Does your quote say anything which you couldn't have said better?
[ ] Does the quote reflect you as an individual. Do you see yourself in those lines?
[ ] Does the quote reflect your goals better than what yoru words could have?
[ ] Is your quote even relevant?

I'm sure there are more fields one could add to the above checkbox test. If you can think of any, do let me know, I'll add them in.

Some argue that writing quotes makes the SOP more personalised. It helps catch that
critical attention while your application packet is being analysed. Others argue that writing a quote makes your SOP unprofessional and school boyish. Whoever cares about what Gandhi had to say when they are looking for your professional goals. In short, there are two schools of people when it comes to the quote factor. Most will argue on for hours, tear each other's hair and clothes at the end of it all, yet come to no conclusion. I unfortunately had the chance to ask people from the two schools together about my quote dilemma. What followed was a debate for over an hour, where they totally forgot about me and kept arguing. The debate ended as most college debates do - unconcluded.

There are those strange threads on edulix that catch my attention. So we had a person wanting to quote in Sanskrit on his SOP. I immediately wrote him off as a guy who'd wear flashy shirt to get attention. Cheap attention is what he wanted, he'd get that but no admits. Even as I grr-ed about it, my friend and an ms-student asked 'why not'. What if the school is looking for diversity. In that case a sanskrit quote would surely make a point.

Both sides have valid arguments. Its upto you to choose. I know you hate this answer, but its the only answer I have.

About me - yes I did quote Gibran on my SOP. But during the orientation when the GDP said - We would have assigned you a correct advisor if you wrote what you were supposed to on your SOP, and not about Gandhi. I saw quite a few guys blush deep pink. I wrote a Gibran quote, so I watched back with unflinching eyes. Luckily, I have been assigned a good advisor :-)

I walked out of the orientation wondering if I should not have written the quote afterall. But it was the same SOP that got me through this school. Well, maybe without the quote I would have had a fee waiver as well. Its endless. Bye.

Ms-Student.

I will be more careful about what I write in here. This blog is meant to be looked up by ms-students when in doubt, to know that there has been a girl who applied for her MS for Fall 2006, who has made it through. She's been through what you are going through, and she's come out of it too. Here she is in UMass Amherst doing exactly what she wanted to. There are moments of self doubt still. But they are cleared by moments of light, by moments when she see realises this is where she had wanted to be - and this is where she is. This blog is about motivation, about setting oneself free, about living life the way you want to, about leaving home to make another, about working hard, about setting goals, achieving them.

Good luck to you, dear Master's student, and may this blog show you the light.

November 08, 2006

You don't know.

When you speak to an ms student, speak to her gently. you don't know which world she is caught up in, you don't know what thoughts are running through her head, you don't know when she's had her last meal, you don't know when she's last had six complete hours of sleep, you don't know what is reminding her of home now, you don't know what memory is making her cry in her head as she smiles back, you don't know how much she second guesses her decisions, you don't know how cold she is, you don't know which day of her life she misses today, you don't know the picture of the day in her head, you don't know what she dreamt about as she slept in the lab, you don't know how dreams of home make her cry, you don't know a thing about her. you don't know what she has left behind. you don't know what she has. you just don't know anything at all.

October 18, 2006

Reality in Dreams

I am going in a rickshaw sitting in the corner as usual, with Mummy and Daddy. We are going to G. Aunty's house, and Mummy is complaining that the rickshawalla is taking us by the road which runs next to a gutter just so that he can make more money in a longer route. The meter reads that the amount is 21 rupees. I'm having a small bottle of lemon Gatorade, and when its time to get off, I give it half full to a beggar, giving the last thing I own from the US away. On our way back, we're in a bus, sitting in the first window seat on the top deck, and I'm telling mummy this feels like a dream, as the bus goes past Indian Oil Nagar. I'm holding her hand, feeling the warmth, and wondering it cannot be a dream because one cannot feel warmth in a dream. Mummy assures me, its not a dream, its real, you are here. I'm telling her that I'm not going back, because I like it here a lot more than in Amherst, I don't want to leave home again. She hugs me and tells me that I don't have to.

And then my friend switches on the light, I get out of bed see the time and go straight for the door to rush to my house. I open the door. The door opens in Amherst. Its a cold, grey, rainy morning. The sky has descended on earth, all the way, greyed everything around, desaturated all the colors. I shiver, put my hands in my pockets as I walk homewards. It was a dream afterall. Afterall, I woke up. I reach my house, shut the door, trying to regain the lost link between dreams and reality. The link had snapped, I had lost the last thread that I could hold on to, as dreams flipped back to reality, like a measuring spring tape where the tape rolls back with a snap. Physically I had snapped back, but my reality was left behind in another dream.

Not many know that long before I was Evenstar, long before I am who I am, I was 'reality in dreams'.

October 16, 2006

It's bullshit.

Originality is valued in the US, they said. Original non-text book answers will fetch you a B Grade. Teaching in the US is awesome. Slide shows is what we have for every lecture. Same slides since the last how many years. Four hours of sleep, one meal a day is what you will have. You will shiver in the cold at the bus stop and cry for the bus to come soon. You will fight with the ones closest to you because they demand your time and attention. You will stay over at night in the lab, sleep in a public lounge, and go for class the next day. You will wonder how different things were back home, and how your mother would have to ask you to have a cooked, ready, hot dinner and yet you would say 'later ma' as you long for a good meal. You will think about the days when you slept for eight whole hours and thought why not ten. You will struggle to find time for your hobbies. It will be two years until you read your next book or watched a new movie. You may have the money but never the time to buy a camera. And if you do, you will never have the time to photograph. Maybe because you will stop looking at things. And you will realise this when you stand at the bus stop one day and wonder, when did these leaves change from green to fiery orange, and when did they fall? MS in the US is overrated. Here I am, leading an ordinary life like so many ms-students before me, I'm not the next William Shockley, I shall complete my homework, or struggle to complete it on time, struggle to complete my lab using tools I have never used before. I shall struggle to keep up, to wake up each morning, run to catch the bus, miss it and sit on the thinking rock and cry. Cry out of frustration, out of anger directed inwards, out of sheer lack of sleep.

I am not going back to India this summer. Not this, not the next. Because I know if I go I wouldn't want to come back. There is no veil of uncertainty now, I know what I have here, and what I have left behind.

On a positive note, I have a graduate assistantship, which means I do not necessarily have to work in the US for another few years to pay back my Ms-fees. I'm so much luckier than most others who are in the same position, but shall have to work like bonded labor here, while they want to go back home, just to repay the student loans in which they are neck deep.

Life is overrated.

: Name: Selma Mirza; Location: Amherst, Massachusetts, United States

We're funny people. We want to belong to communities, make friends, and yet stay away and keep a safety margin. We want to talk about ourselves, and yet don't want to talk a whole lot about ourselves lest we disclose too much information. Its strange how we all want to reach out and be reached out for, and yet hide at unreachable places, far and beyond anybody's reach. Sometimes I do feel lost. In this world of fast moving cars, fast changing beliefs and faster changing people, I feel lost. The world is becoming smaller they say. It may shrink down to the size of a pea, but we will all still be alone. // I love water, I am water, when I stagnate I reflect, when I let go I flow away. I love sand, I am everything you want me to be. A ship, a castle, a message for a lover. And yet when forced I crumble into sand again. I get washed by the sea, I traverse oceans and distances looking for another story in my head. // more

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December 30, 2007

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December 25, 2006

The story so far.