A Pleasant Surprise

I had recently been contacted by a final year undergraduate at my previous university, where I finished by Bachelor’s degree. He was interested in continuing the work that I did there as an undergraduate and he would appreciate any heads-up that I could give him. He also had little knowledge in the specific area and asked me for recommendations on reading material.

Seeing that it was someone from my alma mater, I decided to be genial and gave the student some pointers. So, I gave him some pointers and some recommendations on what to read it. It is a wonder to me that I can still remember stuff from back then. Actually, I have come to realise the importance of good design, because it helps me to recall how the darn thing works years from now, simply because the design decisions flow beautifully from one to the next.

However, considering the number of years it has been since I had left, there was no possibility that he had ever met me in person. Furthermore, my final year project supervisor is presently furthering his studies in Japan. So, I was rather curious as to how he found out about my project, why he decided to work on it and how he found out my contact information.

This was when he mentioned to me that certain lecturers at the university, spoke fondly of me. He mentioned that one in particular, said that the university was fortunate to have had people like me during its early years. Now, this surprised me thoroughly as I had not parted on the best of terms with the university, but I guess they left out all the juicy bits and focused on my positive contributions.

I can understand why the university may think that it was lucky, that way. There are many of my fellow peers, who are doing all kinds of interesting things in this world. Several of us have furthered our studies to the PhD level at many of the best engineering universities in the world. Many of the rest are scattered around the world working for various multinational corporations. Considering that my graduating class had only about 300+ students across all disciplines, this is quite an achievement.

There is actually a reason for this as the first 3 batches from my alma mater, were almost all (95%) fully funded overseas scholars. We only ended up at the university due to the 1997 Asian economic crisis. One of the steps taken by the government to control the outflow of currency was to cut the scholars going overseas for education. So, our university was filled with students who are generally considered the cream of the country.

However, I cannot attribute our success to merely good students. On top of that, our university had a really ambitious vision and the necessary backing to achieve it. We were lucky enough to have had some really good lecturers teach us from the very first year, a well structured programme designed by the top educators of the world, as well as access to the best equipment that money could buy. There was also a genuine encouragement and push from the university, for the students to excel.

So, this is why I have always contended that my alma mater is the best university in the country (it was in the running for Apex University as well!).