Archis's Blog

I shall be one of 20 top student technolonists in India interning at Microsoft selected through the code4bill competition. The competition was a fun, ruthless and tough struggle for this position, and yet, I know that it was all luck. I’m all excited about the internship right now. Wish me luck! You can read more about this on my BLOG soon. It has been my dream company for the last one-and-a-half year; especially when I found out that C.A.Hoare (the inventor of the Quicksort) works in MS R&D. Microsoft R&D is my ideal place!

Although my internship is at the IDC, I’m hoping the future prospects would be in R&D.

Who would have guessed? I gave the first round during Calyx within 2 hours. I completed the second round (really tough) thinking I’m done for! and I completed the third round again in only 2 hours while preparing for LinuxAsia. I was the only person whose interview questions were somewhat easier than others’. I guess there really is such a thing as Luck. Or if Obi-Wan Kenobi is right, then I have a guardian angel watching my back.

I am probably the first Indian and only single undergrad student to participate in the Brain Computer Interface Competition III. I participated only in the first dataset due to lack of time, college pressures and the fact that I was developing Fergusson Linux alongside. Anyways, I managed to score a 79% accuracy with the highest being 91%. I single-handedly ranked 13th and my results are better than some very huge universities. View their results page for more authentic information.

It feels great to be the first Indian (both by origin and location) to have participated in the BCI competition and perhaps also the only undergraduate student in the world to have done it. What’s more is that achieving the 13^th position did a lot to give me a moral boost and the confidene that my abilities to conduct research were only limited due to lack of resources. From this event onwards, I’ve decided to do research because I like it – I dont give a damn about degrees or paperwork. And I dont care what people think about me either. I’m much happier this way as compared to the submissive person I used to be trying to please everyone to earn a good degree in hopes of pursuing research.

Let me tell you a little secret. If you think that sucking up to someone and getting good grades is going to help you, you’re unimaginably mistaken. I tried that for a few years and realised that people will always be demeaning and will try to pull you down. The lack of good grades is just an excuse they use to throw you out. When you do have good grades, they’ll say that the education system is so mundane that anyone who manages to get good grades is not creative enough. It’s better to be happy doing what you like.

Although BCIs are my primary love and only possible career choice for me, I’m still having trouble finding funding. For all those science enthusiasts who’re being roped in to do someone else’s work under false promises of research grants for crazy ideas, let me hit you with the reality – its all fake. Nobody really cares about pure science anymore. They just use it to portray themselves as higher or more holistic human beings compared to others. These people completely miss out on the whole point of science – which is to do stuff for its own sake!