Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Sounds familiar?


[Update: Edited out the old title and a sentence in the post.]

* * *

In a post about her Stanford education, Lakshmi Saligram has a short segment on her (engineering) undergrad experience that should sound familiar to many of us:

I did my bachelors degree in Electronics & Communications Engineering (ECE), because anyone who “did well” in class 12 usually opted for this track in India. Since I didn’t know what to do with my life at that time, I did what everyone else did. Very quickly I realized that I hated it, but in the messed-up Indian university system that I studied in, once you selected your field of study, there wasn’t any turning back. So what if you made a mistake? So what if you started liking something else? We don’t care. Just sit, and study. And study I did. I hated it, but my grades never showed it. [...] But there was no love, and now in hindsight I realize, if you don’t love it, you will never learn it.

0 Comments: