Six-months at NCST-Bangalore

I am writing this after one year and eight months of leaving NCST in Feb 2005. At that time I did not have my own blog site, but I used to regularly read the post on Raman sir's blog. It used to slowly motivate me to have one of my own and finally in the winters of 2005 I laid the foundation stone for this blog. My first post was dated Sunday, December 18, 2005. About 2 months later I started 'khichuri' along with Khuman Ngakpa, which is rather a collection than a blog.

So the question is what prompted me to type this post now? The reason is recent post by Raman sir. Encouraged by him many ncstians of the present batch have started their own blog and started it with a post on their experiences in ncst till now. After reading through all those narratives, I too felt like narrating my experience.

For some interesting reasons my batch is considered among the worst batches the institute have had, though I guess it was a beautiful patch of our lives. But its better if I start from where it all started.

It was my final year of my engineering and I was thinking 'what next?'. Though I had given the CST and got 97% in I-level, but NCST was not in my list. But then nothing was. My parents thought I was bit weird as I was not so anxious to get a job. To tell the fact they were really pushing me to get a job, and I was like I will get it but what’s the big deal. That when I started to think about NCST specially their Bangalore campus. Reason? Simple I wanted to see the city. So that’s why I landed up in NCST-Bangalore with a sole aim to learn lot of things which the course content had mentioned.

In the first month itself I was sure I was part of a different kind of institute. To quote from one of the blog "paradise for programmers'. Actually 'programmer' is a wrong term to describe an ncstian; they are better described as 'solution architect'. Let it be assignments, quizzes, project or the (in)famous mgpt, everything forces you stretch your capabilities. You are made to think beyond what you have thought before. Two such things which I still remember are the BigInt C++ assignment and network file system project. NCST is the only place where I have performed below my own expectations number of times, though I did not fail in anything in terms of marks. Only thing which troubles me is off-target results and I had to face a lot of those here forcing me to lift the bar.

But NCST is not all about all that hard work. There was volleyball (I never played, only enjoyed the game) and chatting with friends in various part of the campus. In fact that was the most popular time-pass through out the day; first floor classroom had the option during class also. Late nights are a common thing in NCST and we made it exciting by going for drinking tea at 2am in morning to a tea stall on the Hosur road. Also another aspect special about NCST was the faculty, they are simple awesome. They treat you more as friends, that enables you to be more open with them and that the biggest enabler in the learning environment of NCST. Then I remember New Year celebration we organized. It was a real fun with its set of controversies.

NCST-Bangalore has one thing special about it. Its best described in this line I got from one of the post - "Here we have Raman Sir". I won’t add to that.

I had to leave the course in Feb 2005, but that more because my parents were very worried about my job and I had one offer from HCL Tech. But it was a loss not being able to complete the course, but that’s life. Now when I look back I would say it was a great six-month experience at an institute which handles education the way it should be. Many do complain about lot of things about the institute; my take is that, complains are just inconsequential excuses for our own incapabilities.

NCST-Bangalore is a great place where you can learn, enjoy and make lots of good friends; what else can you ask for?