Mastering via Distance: Part One

When I appeared for the entrance exam on the rainiest day of June 2013; little did I know that it was the entry point to altogether a different experience than college or CDAC. Those awesome two to three months for each semester in three different colleges and travelling through train, bus, auto, jeep, etc to isolated exam centres. I met a new set of working friends and had a lot of memories. Putting down a few here…

The Beginning

The list of students was put on website according to PCP centres; mine was VCET College, Vasai Road. Here I met a lot of M friends: Minal Gupta, Mamta Kadam, Mitali Pawar, Megha Kumbhare, Mayur Patil and so on. A few others were Priya Deshmukh, Karishma Singh and Sajla, Pooja, Viraj Narkar, Vrushali Patil, Jayashree Jain, Sujata Swamy, Nikita More, Bhavika Gaichare, Ankit Keer, Gitesh Patil, etc. On weekdays, the lectures used to be at 6pm. There was light only on the floor where the lecture room was. Rest of the college was in dark. I attended only one lecture. We had to use mobile torches to come down the stairs. On weekends, I attended lectures of DM (Discrete Mathematics) by Anahita Garad Ma'am and practicals of C Programming by Sainath Sir. It was a task to search a working PC in order to perform the programs. Mehul Sir gave one enthusiastic lecture on SAD (System Analysis and Design), plus narrated his story of completing Masters. Lectures on ECO (Principles of Economics and Management) were taken by the Course Co-ordinator and Web Technology was taken by Head of IT, I did not attend any of these lectures. Since many of us were working, how did we catch up on all the details? The reason was Satya (SatyaPrakash Tiwari). He created a closed group on Facebook and kept all of us updated on the course. So in order to be a part of the group, I had to create a facebook account. The benevolent Isha Kothari shared hard copies and soft copies of notes, practicals, question paper, etc. Working for five days in office, this exhausted mind was still excited to attend lectures on weekends. I was enjoying meeting this new lot of friends. Everyone had a reason to come here. Do not ask us why the hell we did the course, even when some of us were having jobs in hand! We got the assignment questions and the submission date. It was really tedious to write the assignments. Normally we do Xerox our friends assignment but here in age of smartphones all the assignments got clicked! For COA (Computer Organization and Architecture), there were no lectures; only assignment submission and that too on a weekday. Many, including me, had to almost fly from office to reach VCET. Our friends did keep the Ma’am waiting till all of us reached college. Finally the assignment submissions were done. Now the practicals were similar to graduation ones: randomly pick a question from the lot and execute the program and show the output to examiner. Then there were VIVA sessions by external examiner. Done with all these, our halltickets were out. We had to go to University to collect it. Now the working ones had to already apply for leave in advance. Many got the approvals, while a few had to go half day after the exam was over. My exam centre was Kirti College, again! It was same during high school and graduation. I saw the sealink from under construction to completion. Three of us: I, Karishma and Chetana Valanju got this center. The papers were lengthy to write and those who copy did their job! Finally the exams were over and this marked the completion of first angle on the hexagon journey. It was nice two weeks of holiday from office and becoming a student again for two months!

Read Next: Mastering via Distance: Part Two