MSc (Honours) Physics

I am also a physics major. But that is the end of the story. The year I did my physics was a disaster. But the disaster made men out of us boys. It taught us the art of putting up a bright face in moments of despair. We learnt to make jokes of those desperate moments. We learnt resilience and shamelessness instead of celestial body movements or atomic behavior.

Ok, that was a little too much. We got #$%^ed everywhere, all the time, but we still had fun. I swear.

Our names in red with a bold D (mid & end semester grades) beside them in department notice boards only evoked a sense of pride. We did what no other batch of students had done before.

In the quantum mechanics classes (which we attended only to collect our test papers), we were the only group of guys who giggled when the professor said bra; even at the end of the semester. Apparently there is a bra and a ket which makes a bracket.

We photocopied studious guys' class notes for open book exams. But the agony of not being able to match answers in the work books to the questions asked just because the moron who gave us the notes didn't write down the questions in class is inexplicable.

There was another course we did and I do not want to name it. Because, if you asked me anything other than its name, I wouldn't know. The course was for 100 marks and the final exam (alternate name: compre) contributed 40 marks to it. We did not know if we would fall into an E or a D. We wanted that D desperately. So we went to up the professor in a hope for a pullup (you get pulled to a higher grade if the professor recognised your face).

One of us: Sir, pullup

Prof: Definitely. How much did you make?

Another one of us: Sir, 25

Prof: 25 in compre. That is fantastic.

The other one of us: No sir. In total.

The look on the instructor's face said it all.

Prof: 25 in total deserves a D.

I think he intended to figuratively spit on our faces for ours marks. But we did it again! We got our Ds!

On the first day of campus interviews, I was shortlisted by the two companies selecting candidates that day. #$% was one of them. I cleared three gruelling rounds of interviews before I met the big man, the final hurdle. I believe he was a book worm once. He started of with questions from my chemical engineering. I stood unnerved for twenty minutes. He looked lost and the battle seemed to be won, until he said: What did you read in electro magnetic theory?

me: We read about the effects of electricity on magnetic properties.

My raised left eyebrow gave it all. I was shown the door. I made it at the other company!

Even today a lot of people ask me: You are a chemical engineer. But why physics? You must really like physics!

me: You bet I do!

* we, us - Balan, Kampa & myself