That's me again after a long break. From last several days my status in yahoo messenger shown "deeply burried into trouble" and one can easily guess what that trouble was.
I did not want to push myself to the limits as I did in my first stage I started working well before the submission date. I started my work in september, although slowly but at a constant pace. After finishing with my subject GRE ( Fortunately, I manage to get 91% in a week's effort) I accelerated my efforts in my project.
Entire circuit manipulation by myself!!! I used STL very extensively and overwhelming use of pointers and indirection. No wonder I spend many hours trying to get rid of the nightmare of any programmer, that is : "Segmentation fault". Also, I discovered another nightmare which many other fellow programmers are fortunate not to see it in their lifetime. That is "****glibc error***:double free or corruption". I really wonder how difficult would it be if someone tries to extend my MTP. Of course, I have put in comments in the program and a lot of guidelines can be found in the CVS logs. But I must admit, in order to complete certain functionality in a hurry, i compromised in terms of design. I could have done better design but I would rather go on with adding other functionalities than rewriting a lot of code.
Anyways, at the end of december I was busy in placements. I had not signed yahoo, MS, qualcomm, morgan stanley, sybase. Google, amazon and trilogy came at the early stage of CSE placement and they all kicked me out after the written test. However, it did not come as a surprise to me as I was damn confident about my skill of writing a C/C++ program on a paper. I knew that as long as companies will ask to write a program on a piece of paper, I am not going to be selected for the interview. Companies came and gone but it did not had any effect on me. I was still working very hard with my second stage implementation.
Then came symantec, the first company for me which did not ask to write a C/C++ program on a piece of paper. Of course, I made my way through all three interviews. But, HR screwed me up. The moment I finished my HR interview I knew that I am gone. Rejection by symantec shook me up. Fortunately I was able to crack Induslogic the next day. This time I had to tell a lot of lie in front of HR, but I knew I had no other choice if I wanted to get selected.
Anyways, the same day I went to meet my supervisor. I asked him which company is better to work with in the area of formal verification. He was supportive. He offered to get me an interview with all those companies. So nice of him!!! But as soon as we switched topic to my MTP, I did not knew that a long TODO list was waiting for me. Last 9 days were remaining and I had to finish the work on the TODO list. From the moment I heard what my supervisor is asking me to do, I knew that implementation is way beyond my capacity. So it was obvious, I could not finished all three things which he asked me to implement in time.
Without worrying much about the implementation I started writing my report. I could not afford to waste much time on implementation anymore. I would have missed my submission deadline if I had continued with my implementation.
And as usual, my guide was too busy to look at my report, which by the way, I handed him over two days prior to submission deadline. I thought the same thing will happen to the slide. Fortunately or unfortunately he had a look at my slide a day ahead of my presentation. Series of suggestion followed and I had to burnt my night again to modify the slides.
As the time of presentation approached my anxiety increased. I had not slept well for two days ( and two nights also ;-) ). Something inside me was telling me that things may go wrong and it did. Examiner started with very simple questions but I got confused, my mind just went blank. I was not understanding what he was asking, what he was saying. And even if I knew the answer I could not present or express it. Fortunately my guide came to the rescue when examiner and chairman started to corner me on the wrong basis.
So all in all, my presentation was a disaster. It's been a relief to me that my guide did not think so. I have not gone to see my grades and I know that AA and AB are out of sight after having such a bad presentation. And I can not blame it all to examiner. I must admit I was not well prepared for the presentation.
Now I have only one chance.. the third stage. I better be prepared for that.
