Waiting Around Due to Covid
The backstory
We had about 2 weeks of classes for my final semester, before colleges were shut down in mid march. Months passed, we did all our tests, assignments, and presentations online. Things were honestly going okay, except for the air of uncertainty with respect to final examinations.
UGC
I cannot begin to express my unrelenting hatred for this organisation. The University Grants Commission of India, they oversee university certification and credibility. You follow what they say, or you get your univeristy license revoked. Now these guys, for the longest time, made it seem like they were going to be announcing the cancellation of final exams. My initial joining date for my job was supposed to be July 20th. July 4th, they announce that they are indeed cancelling final examinations for every semester, EXCEPT the final semester.
Anyone who has studied semester-wise in a choice-based credit system, knows how each semester is independant of one another. Especially in an engineering course, the bulk of the important subjects are taught in your 2nd and 3rd year, while the final year is focused on projects and internships, with just a few insignificant theory subjects.
Not only did they take so many months to decide to finally have exams for us, they only held exams for final semester students. These are the same students who have already completed all core subjects, and have been tested on them too. 45+ final examinations, and they still made us wait for 3 insignificant theory exams before we graduated. We even finished all our internal assessments for the semester. They could have easily extrapolated our 8th semester marks based on previous semesters and the internal assessment, just as they did for every other semester, but NOOOOOOO, they think that final semester exams = exit exams. It might have been back in the day when the people making the decisions were studying, but it isn’t the case anymore when most universities have adopted a choice-based credit system. To this day, it irks me how they were able to promote our juniors, who had far more important subjects like OS, networks, algorithms, etc., which are core CS subjects, WITHOUT testing them, but they refused to promote us over 3 stupid subjects that we already basically learnt in previous semesters. Their decision preventing mine, and countless others’ careers from proceeding for months, or even a year. In the best case, some companies allowed students to start working before their final exams were finished, but that still put the burden of balancing acadamia and work on the shoulders of students, already stressed from an ongoing pandemic.
I felt weeks of frustration at the injustice. They cancelled it for everone else, except the students who actually need to graduate quickly to start their jobs or those seeking higher education. My university then proceeded to set exam dates at the end of August, with expected results to be announced at the end of September. Did I mention they made us write exams IN PERSON with people who travelled from all across the country during a pandemic? My job’s joining date was delayed to November, as they required my final semester marks before I start, as well as partly because they also had some internal issues with onboarding students in batches.
What have I been doing?
Its kind of frustrating as I really don’t like being unproductive, and the best way for me to stay productive is to have work that I need to do. Most of my peers had started working by mid September, while I’m still here waiting for November to get here.
At the very least, I took the opportunity to get LASIK eye surgery done, which went well, and took about 2 weeks for the vision to return to normalcy. Glad I got to do it when I didn’t have to stare at code on a screen for hours every day. I also got chores which I was putting off done, like organising my digital life and getting my vehicle serviced (shout out to Ather and their fantastic electric scooters and service).
I’ve now started to better myself technically, I looked into some projects I could start working on, and some tools and tech I could start learning to use. Hopefully I get some good work done before I start my job.