Greener grass

I really want to write a long post about this, but sometime this semester I became a quickfix-junkie, and seem to have lost whatever patience I had for long things: long conversations, long walks, long posts.. So I'll just say what I want to say and keep it short.

By and large, most of the students here at BITS complain about how most of the professors suck, about how courses are not handled properly, about how the exams are more focussed on learning formulae and solving problems than about actually testing what the student knows. Needless to say, most of these complainers are people in the 6-8 CG range, but what they say is right for the most part.

I downloaded a couple of video lectures from Berkeley's site last semester when I was having trouble with the Microelectronic Circuits course, and I was simply blown away by the professionalism shown by the professor. He was teaching, answering doubts, talking about stuff that was going on in the industry at that time, urging his students to read papers, attend conferences, and a lot more. What I found the most striking was that he seemed to be in absolutely no hurry to complete the course. He had no qualms about clearing doubts which were only remotely related to the topic at hand. At one point, he talked on for about fifteen minutes about processors and their clock speeds, while the lecture was about frequency response of circuits.

Contrast this with professors here, who teach only that which is there on the handout, and skillfully skirt around doubts which are unrelated to the topic being taught. I always naively believed that this was a shortcoming on the professor's part, but now I think I know better. The reason why professors here seem so bad is not because their knowledge is limited, it's because of the restrictions imposed upon them by the administration. They HAVE to finish the course on time, no leeway allowed. While I don't know what'll happen if they don't finish it on time, I'm pretty sure that it won't be anything good. And then there are professors who have done PhDs in specific courses, and are being forced to teach Probability and Statistics to first yearites. Can you really blame them for their disinterest?

The source of this enlightenment on my part in the course Analog and Digital VLSI Design, handled by prof. Anu Gupta. It is, without a doubt, the best course that I've done here. We had regular lectures, we had two assignments (one analog, one digital), we had vivas on those assignments. In each assignment, we actually did stuff that engineers designing chips do. We created the circuits, generated layouts, extracted parasitics, minimized power consumption, and a whole lot of stuff besides. We had seniors who cleared our doubts. And anyone could enter Prof. Anu Gupta's chamber at any time during the day, and she would entertain their doubts instead of shooing them away. This is the only course in which I have not fallen asleep during the lectures. There is just so much to learn, and she manages to cram so much stuff into one 50-minute lecture, that even I, despite my hatred for electronics, found myself wide awake and attentive.

And at the end of the course, she did something that no other prof has done so far for us: she asked us for feedback. She stood in front of the board, and she asked us to suggest ways in which the course could be improved. She explained the problems that she faces while handling the course, the problems associated with using the bright and shiny software available at Olab (our vlsi design lab), and she asked us to put across to her anything new that we learnt about the course or the tools so that she could improve the course accordingly.

And I believe that almost every professor here would like to do that, but they find themselves, as I said before, teaching probability and statistics to first yearites.

What a waste