Chapter - 7

It was the last week in college. It was time for the final review. The fun was drawing to a close, and really quickly that too. The past week was when the department farewell night had taken place. This year’s Electrical department night had been a grand success, with more than 400 people turning up, more than twice the usual average. The professors had enjoyed it, it involved a lot of them getting tripped. One thing we realized was, professors enjoyed tripping students, but if there’s something they enjoyed more, it was fellow professors getting tripped. That evening had been an emotional one for me. I had headed the department’s student association for two straight years, and this time was for handing over the reins to an able junior.

We had been playing cricket every evening for nearly a month now, and that was another thing I was surely going to miss. We made it a point to play, because god knows when we would get to play this carefree again.

Next up, I had to face my thesis review, and defence. It was made up to be a very scary occasion with various professors sitting in the audience, and trying to catch us unawares about some mistake in our project. It could be in the very hypothesis on which our project was based, or could be on some small idea which took it forward, whatever. But the project had to be defended successfully for a degree.

I nervously entered the room for my defence. There was a team of 7 professors, and my friends sitting there, cheering aloud as usual. The presentation started slowly, and I tried to come to put to words what I had done over the last one year. I had thought that this would be the easiest part of my project, but I had been mistaken, it was by no means, a joke. As the equations turned up on screen, trying to get my audience make sense of those equations started becoming painful. At some point of time, I realized that the equations were going above the head of the audience, and so I had to cleanly skip major parts of my presentation, so as to rush to the results section, and at least try to make them understand what I’d obtained out of this whole thing. But that was disaster number two. I quickly thanked my guide, and looked around for questions. There weren’t any. I walked out of the room. I had screwed the presentation, but hell yeah, I was a dual degree from IIT Madras now.