Monday, August 08, 2005

Courses/Choruses/Coarses

[The title is nothing more than a seemingly ongoing exercise in homophones like the title on this blog, but don't read too much into it :-) ]

For those friends who're interested in the gruesome details of what courses I'm taking here, a small précis:

* Foundation Lab: Mandatory Lab work

* Foundations of IT-2: Mandatory course (mainly to do with Probability/Stats). This has been an area in which I have been particularly weak in the past, so I was hoping to catch up and take those giant steps, but the immediate forecast on that front doesn't immediately show "fair weather" for several reasons that I shall remain quiescent about at the moment and reveal all when the time is ripe for the picking :-)

And on to the Electives:
* Mobile Computing: Aim here is to learn a bit about this area that I had a brief peek into while at work in a Telecom project.

* Introduction to Data Mining: I seem to have got it into my head long back that I was interested in text & data mining - just one of those things. Here's my chance to find out.

* Object Oriented Techniques: I wasn't planning to go in for this, but decided to stay back after attending the first few "test" lectures, mainly because I liked how the prof. went about it and because I found myself responding to the content.

Now, those who know how things function here will notice that I have not taken any courses from the CSE Dept here, especially the Algorithms or Databases (by Sudarshan of the book fame) - these are the feted courses here. This decision was mainly because I'm not much of a theory guy and do want to sink my teeth into the areas I want to test the waters in. I was keen on taking Soumen Chakraborty's Statistical Foundations of Machine Learning, but I found the course contents and treatment quite formidable. Plus my prob/stats sucks right now.

Tejaswi (from the senior batch, whose advice I've been seeking on matters related, and who essentially has a great deal to say, in general :-) ) would be disappointed, for his theory holds that you take courses based on the profs. and experience the best of what IIT has to offer here, at the risk of bad grades. The "bad grades" sign is fine with me - it's just that I don't want to spend time in a class that I ultimately don't enjoy. That said, I find I'm slightly less adventurous than most :-) though I can quote a couple of small gutsy items on the CV, but perhaps they're not enough :-). My reluctance to go back to theory finds me settling for these courses ultimately. Perhaps I'll seek more foreign pastures next time. Right now, I'll take it as easy as I'm allowed to.

2 Comments:

Blogger Tejaswi said...

Btw, Its Soumen Chakrabarti, and Supratik Chakraborty.

Its already good enough that S.Chakakraborti is getting two paychecks here...

1:53 AM  
Blogger J Ramanand said...

Thanks T - since the post, whenever I forget the spelling, I use "anarchism outbreak" to guide me :-)

9:00 AM  

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