Journey Continued…IITM MS Interview

26th April, 4am, I woke up in train with anxiety that I still had not reached Chennai Central and I had my written test at IITM from 8am. Some Goods’ train got derailed and I was stuck somewhere, far away from chennai, at least 25km. Not much locality around, the only way was to reach near by highway, by walk, to get a bus, the station master said. In that all dark, thanks to my friend, I found a contact number of fast track cab. I booked a cab which reached the near by highway almost around 6am. I rushed to CS department with my luggage at 7:45am. oh..(sigh of relief)! O, I forgot to mention, I saw a deer just standing by the road while coming to the CS department. 🙂

Soon I learned, the test got postponed by an hour. With all tiredness from last two nights’ train journey, I was feeling really sleepy..Oh, the test was going to start in minutes!

The test was in two parts, first a short mcq paper followed by a descriptive type paper. Mcq paper had few 1marks, few 2marks questions with no -ve marking. 🙂 It had questions from  digital, basic aptitude, combinatorics. Unfortunately, I don’t remember them.

Descriptive part was actually tougher. It had questions from Cache hit-miss, Sequential ckt (counter), Complexity- recurence relation, Fibonacci series, Ramsay theorem (thanks to sarthak, I didn’t know it before), combinatorics n all. Here among 8 questions we had to do 5.

The good thing about iitm was that they took the application fees from the candidates were called for interview. But with my forgetful mind I left my demand draft at home and after test, ran to the campus SBI to get a new demand draft. Quickly finished my lunch and planned to dump my luggage at hostel. But only could reach up to the hostel reception and I had to literally ran back to the department as I came to know that they had started announcing the result and declaring interview timings. I kept my luggage at the reception only. And trust me, Chennai is the hottest and perhaps one of the most humid places in India.

Got selected for interview which was on that very day only. Document verification started soon I reached. In the same day, same dress, same me, after 2days of train journey, I appeared for the interview! Drank a cup of  coffee, which they served for free, to keep myself from dozing off . I tried my best not to go with a haggard face. And in all these I got confused which subject I should choose for interview. My interview call came around at 5pm. Although I had had a plan to say Automata, I suddenly selected Data Structure in front of a panel of 7-8 profs and one of them started questioning with a cynic smile in his face,

1. What is equivalence relation?
2. How can u represent equivalence relation with a data structure?
3. Which data structure? how efficient? How can u test for equivalence efficiently?
4. Shorting algo which does not take any xtra space
5. matrix inverse

And finally they asked me to leave. I left with a puzzled face, thinking whether it was ok or bad. Profs were mostly helpful, but they cross interrogated a bit, asked about research interest also.

Finally, a long day ended. Had dinner at Gurunath, a food court where u could get burger, juice, bread omlete, even fuchka, n came back to the Saravati hostel. This time I found a bunch of deer and they stayed calmly by the side of the lane, while I walked past them. There were three green colored iron beds in the room without any mattress. Whatever it was, I took a shower and lied down on one of them.

Btw, let me tell you, the day was a success. 🙂

Journey continued unexpectedly … IITKGP

Now, I had no clue about this and I am sure many people do not know about such opportunity. So it’s for those who want to go for MS/PhD at IIT KGP.

As soon as I was back to Mumbai, I got a call from my friend and learned that there were something called Temporary Assignments in IIT KGP.
Let me tell you, in IITKGP the scenario is you can not apply for MS/PhD program until and unless you are a project staff (it is called project scholar perhaps) there. So you have to get a temporary assignment and become a project staff to become eligible to apply.
So, with this rank and with no hope I desperately ran for the temporary assignment. The test was on the very next day and eventually emptied my pocket. You know what I mean, I had to fly.

It’s 20th April, Friday and I somehow managed to reach there by 9am. Spent so much money but could not rest in my bad for a while 😦
But it was good that there were a plenty of trains available from Howrah to Kharagpur. I missed Dhouli, there was Jan Shatabdi, then Ishpat … and express takes you much faster than local or passenger trains. I got Jan Shatabdi Exp. and reached there with in 2.5hrs and took a rikhshaw to “Takhyashila”, the building where SIT (School of Information Technology) department was.

About the exam, it was easy. It had multiple choice as well as descriptive question.
Multiple choice questions covered the whole GATE syllabus. There was questions from cache, TCP, paging, indexing, programming, algo.
Descriptive questions were from Data Structure and Programming only, structure, linked list, tree. So, it went well.

Now it was time for lunch, in that BIG campus it was not difficult to find a place to eat, and mostly those were cheap. I could not find a canteen to get the pleasure of unlimited rice n dal in a thali of Rs. 20, as I experienced in my last time visit. But I found Veggies which was also good.

After lunch the results were declared at 2pm and it was time for interview. I went first. I realized that they went through my CV seriously and asked few project and algo related questions. All over, it also went well.

Came back to home and next morning got ready for tatkal booking of another journey.