Sunday, August 8, 2010

The art of examination survival



Things were not looking good for me. A backlog would just outcast me from my family and bring inexplicable ignominy to everyone. The question paper looked like Greek,Latin,Telugu and Marathi to me. My plan had failed miserably. The questions looked as complicated as a boring editorial on Europe's economy in the Hindu. I had read 5 out of the total of 10 chapters, assuming that alternate lessons would be enough for a comfortable score. Some cynical professor who would definitely be born as a toad in his next birth ,thanks to my powerful curses, had messed everything up for us. The first thing I did after getting the question paper was to pinch myself to check if I was in one of those clichéd "stuck in the exam hall with a Chinese question paper in my hand" dream . It was a real paper,not in Chinese, and could not be oil fried to crispy manchurian like I do it in my crazy dreams.And if you are wondering why there is an Anil Kapoor picture, read the entire post.


24 hours ago,my Coimbatore home

I was having a hard time remembering all the circuitry. In fact, the only thing that I found interesting in the entire book of "Linear Integrated Circuits" was the author acknowledging his in-laws who stood by him while he was writing the book. It was frustrating me that I could hardly understand and comprehend even a minuscule portion of the content. Integrated circuits were grating my brain's circuits. This was when I was reminded to use the emergency mugging up technique. The technique was to make relatively easier acronyms to memorize large content . For example when I had to remember chemical equations in the 12th grade, I read CH3COONa as Chatri-Coona and CH3CH2OH as Chatri Chattu Aw. While linear circuits was nothing like chemistry, I decided to make vibgyor like acronyms for answers which had bullet points, by taking the first letters from them. I came up with 'maryBombLeh'(memorized as mary went to bomb the leh valley) , 'marBmwIdle'(after eating idlies, hit and run with your BMW), 'wordPimpdel' (delete and forget whatever a pimp says) and more on the same lines.


Exam hall,Today

A few minutes of sweating vanished the worry in my mind and my blood pressure came back to normal . I looked around for company. Vinoth looked at me and gave me a thumbs down, quite to my relief. Raju however seemed to write something vigorously and that somehow seemed to bother me. I closed my eyes, mumbled hanuman chalisa to myself and somehow convinced myself that I was motivated. I ticked out the questions I seemed to know. With a sparsely ticked question sheet , I started writing whatever I knew. This was when I realized that I remembered the acronyms pretty well, but I did not know the questions to which I had to tag those answers. And for some godforsaken reason, my mind, quite inappropriately, was playing "One two ka four, my name is lakhan' on a infinite loop, which I was unable to stop.

I took a best possible guess and expanded acronyms for questions that I believed were the right ones for the answer that I wrote. For every unknown answer I promised one coconut for lord Ganesha. After an hour, I drank 2 huge cups of water taking all the time I could, for whiling time was also becoming the primary concern. I decided to take on a few unknown questions. To motivate myself, I quoted my past achievement to myself where I had used the sewage disposal system from 9th standard and converted it to a nuclear reactor in 10th standard exams, with just some changes in interior decoration.

Frankly, I seemed to relish the scope I had for my creativity . The first question I had to answer was about something called the Walter-Nelson circuit. I had to narrow things down, both logically and creatively.

I started making a not of all that I could infer. It was invented by two people, it had to be somewhat big. The question has a return of investment of 12 marks, so I had to write 2 pages.

""One two ka four, Four two ka one, my name is lakhan", sang my mind when I reached a moment of oblivion. I had no control over the relentless music and images of a hairy Anil Kapoor slide show played on my mind.

Now, I had to put things in perspective. I tried to remember whatever I could from class about Walter-Nelson circuit.

2 months ago, 2nd year classroom

Something called Water -Nelson circuit was written on the board, double underlined. "Your turn now", said Kavikumar, handing over his mobile to me. I hid the mobile under the desk and started batting. In fact, a circular plain faced Tendulkar was batting for me. I had to score 23 in an over to beat Kavi. When I scored 12 off the first 3 balls, an sms interrupted me . Kavi took his mobile,read the message and said to me, "Nothing important, just Shreya wallpapers message.". I gave a momentary and obligatory glance at the teacher who said,"The reason we have 2 capacitors is ".,when Kavi gave me back his mobile and broke my attention.


Exam hall, today
So 2 capacitors is all we know currently. Maybe we will have a resistor for company. As far as I remembered, 80% of circuit diagrams had at least one resistor in them. I decided to start out with the circuit diagram.



Subconsciousness -" Two people have worked to create a circuit, its got to be bigger. This is too trivial . You had to add something more. Maybe something creative."
Subconsciousness said,"yeah, great impulse of creativity. Drawing a fido dido in a circuit diagram totally makes sense."



Subconsciousness: "Okay, For the love of god, the last comment was sarcasm. Stop drawing junk, and save yourself from a backlog. Probably have a two level circuit or something. Meanwhile, let me get back to my song, "One two ka four, my name is lakhan, mera naam hai lakhan'.

Subconsciousness: "Good. A timer adds authencity. Maybe Walter-Nelson invented the time bomb.Anyway, lets wrap things now. Probably complicate stuff and confuse the examiner with one more layer of circuity."


Subconsciousness: "Great. So genuine and authentic. Moment to take pride on our work, inspite of the fact that we do not know what that arrow thing stands for."

I gleamed with a sense of pride and self-appreciation. I then started writing the text for the answer.I wrote a huge paragraph describing the components of the circuit with excellent description accompanying each component. Then I randomly mixed a 'marbmwIdle' and 'wordPimpDel' to form a 'marPimpDel' , and put them quite pragmatically under the heading 'benefits'.

And there you go.


One month later,street corner Ganesha temple

"Dear Lord Ganesha, You rock", I said, breaking the first of my seven coconuts.








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Read between the résumé's lines

The talk of the town is that the economy is picking up. Most companies are in the hiring mode and job portals now have multitudes of résumés getting uploaded every day. While a résumé is meant to showcase the candidate’s skills, most of them turn out to be as funny as a Khushwant Singh joke book, unintentionally though. While I am no expert on writing résumés, I can for sure tell you what not to write it.

Every CV starts with a bit of your personal details in a letter pad format. The name and contact details of the candidate will suffice in the top portion. Avoid using logos of your previous organization or the political party you support. This is followed by the mandatory and ‘taken for granted’ Objective section. This column is usually meant to describe your career ambitions and preferred career path. Pity though that no one fills it up by them self and just do a Ctrl A, Ctrl C and Ctrl V from a friend’s résumé. This portion is generally filled with lofty statements, no short of an election manifesto. A typical IT professional’s objective would go like this, “To work in a highly challenging and stimulating environment which offers enormous scope for growth, innovation and new ideas”. In most cases this roughly translates to “The ungrateful superiors at my previous organization gave me peanuts for a hike and I want more money to pay the EMI for the home loan I took to buy my apartment located at a missile shooting distance from Bangalore airport”.

The most exploited part of your résumé is the skill set portion. Human nature is such that we blow up triviality into something awesome. A typical IT professional lists the programming languages he has worked on, heard about or read about its existence on the internet. A business person’s skill set would have Microsoft Office all split up and described in detail. Please note that if you know Microsoft Excel, just put it there. Detailing different versions of Excel under your skill only adds to the word count.

Every résumé features the set of projects a candidate has worked on. This is a tricky portion for an interviewer. Most candidates fill it up with execubabble aimed solely at making the content indecipherable. Sample this from an IT professional’s résumé “Worked on a comprehensive end to end project which offered utmost scope for communication with other end users offering immense challenge and space for creative ideas.” My guess is that it meant “I had an active Facebook and Orkut profile, while I was documenting my previous project”. The onus is on the interviewer to comprehend the truth behind the unintelligible text written in Times New Roman. While I am on it, I have a policy of hating résumés in Comic sans font. Remember this is a CV, not a cheap brochure detailing unlimited internet plans asking you to contact 'unlimited Shekar for more'.

Interviewers also have to be wary of self made acronyms by the candidate. So when a candidate says I worked on a NASA project, it could be referring to some Natwarlal and Sharma Agency at Gorakhpur. I sampled one résumé which said that a candidate had worked for ISROO which could easily be overlooked as ISRO.

Another clichéd résumé sham section is “Highlights and Past Achievements”. This section offers space for ostentatious projection of a candidate’s market value. Most CVs bullet point a list that starts with “Excellent Leadership skills” and rambles on. If a candidate does not justify how he can claim that he has the aforementioned quality, I would rather prefer reading a home loan pamphlet .I request candidates to note that 173 followers on twitter does not serve as an example of leadership . Organizing impromptu birthday celebrations for friends or Navarathri Kolu events for the housing colony does not qualify as a proof for Organizational skills either. Also, candidates need to make sure that mentioning trivial stuff in Past achievements adds no value. So a third prize in an intra school essay competition is better left unsaid on a résumé.

It is always better to make sure that your resume is as true to its ‘Times New Roman clad word’ as possible. More the brevity, better the résumé. Remember, the number of pages of a résumé is not proportional to the chances of you getting the top notch job. You are not replying to a show cause notice for heaven’s sake.




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