Exam : Holidays :: Bread : Butter

Two weeks back the cloud of examinations loomed over the University of Southampton. The parties stopped, the games were paused and the library was over-booked. An extremely serious atmosphere prevailed in the University as I sat and wrote my first semester exams. For me these exams were different. The way I studied for them was very different to methods I used while studying for an exam in school. Being engineers we aren’t restricted to a syllabus. Back in school we were given a book and we were told that the knowledge needed to write the exam was confined within that specified book. University is different. Here we have to pay close attention to the lecturer. Make notes on relevant materials and expand on those notes using books from the library. We can use one book or ten or none at all; it doesn’t matter. The vital thing is to grasp the concept. That’s it. But it’s not that simple. Hard-work and dedication go hand-in-hand in achieving this mountainous task because after all we are doing Electronic Engineering. If a person randomly took this course, “just for fun”, then clearly he/she would not be finding life very jovial now.

Console.WriteLine(“Hello World”);

No, this isn’t gibberish, it’s the first thing you learn when you study programming. It simply displays “Hello World” and yet we use this programming language to run our systems. Motivating isn’t it? You don’t need a graduate to understand this but you need professionals to actually run the machines. Ofcourse, it isn’t all that simple but with the right attitude nothing is hard. So with this mind-set I undertook my first exams and gave my best in every paper I wrote.

Holidays. Vital. Important. Necessary. Even more essential once you finish your exams. The end of exams marked the beginning of some of the craziest and most entertaining parties I’ve ever been to. After my exams our whole class got together for a party and that night was definitely one of the most memorable nights of my life. I also got a chance to go out of Southampton and visited a beautiful city called Brighton. I also watched some of the movies on my “must see” list and overall it was a much-needed break. After all, holidays complement exams just as butter complements bread.