A career guide for an Indian ECE UG fresher aspiring to join a top school for higher education.

In response to a A2A on a question titled “I am a first-year ECE student. What should I do to get into MIT?”, I ended up writing a rather long answer, based on my experience and learning so far. I thought it may be useful in general to any Indian ECE student at the start of their engineering, and so putting it down for all here. Previously, I had written a generic guide when I was myself in final year, Abhinav Dhere's answer to What should a 4th semester ECE student be doing right now? . Anyway, so here we go:

1. Till about your 5th sem, focus on learning and getting good at your subjects.
2. Work well on core subjects, read from standard books and courses of OCW/edX when available.
3. Try things practically and think about why it works like this. If you can do it in your college labs, good enough, otherwise use simulations in MATLAB/Python.
4. Also, solve problems from standard books. It will be good if you can solve the problems in one standard book for each subject by end of your 6th sem.
5. Try to get a research internship at a reputed research institution after 6th sem. If you can get a peer reviewed publication (not paid journal), it is good, but don’t waste too much time for that.

The steps so far would help you in any case, and make you a better engineer with much more scope ahead. Now here onwards, my suggestion is to attempt applying abroad, but also not let go for M.Tech/MS opportunities in India. I understand it is difficult to manage both, and practically speaking, at that point you may decide on your intuition then, where to give more weightage. Ideally one could go this way -

→ Take GRE in August, and send applications in September. Thereafter forget about it.

→ Assuming you would have followed the steps 1 to 5, you would have crystal clear concepts and have solved problems in standard books. Now from September onwards, solve GATE previous year questions and join a test series. Continue preparation this way till Feb and appear for GATE.

→ By April/May, you would have an idea of which universities are giving acceptance. You would also have your GATE score. Now, don’t go for any random university just because it is in US. Choose the best option you have then.

This requires patience, persistence and a bit of luck, but if you enjoy the science and logic in your subjects, it would be fun in a way, and also take you far ahead.

Also note that this assumes you would be willing to go for higher studies at a top school and wouldn’t get diverted due to peer pressure or societal pressure. Also remember, if you are doing your best, the result in the end would be good for you. As Steve Jobs says, you can only connect the dots when looking backwards. So focus on your efforts and don’t care about the results.

All the best..!

Why people of different communities eat what they do?

I’ve been an early adapter of web trends and hence started blogging around 2007 and continued for some years, making 3–4 different blog websites. However, seeing no response I eventually stopped updating those and started using Facebook for expressing opinions. Then Quora came and captured most of my writing time, but I ended up writing more answers in specific topics and based on A2As.

With this post, I am trying Quora blogs feature first time while also pumping back my original blog on Blogspot. This is so as to cater to the Quora audience in a post blogging era while also catering to any invisible audience on the blog (and also for legacy purposes). I shall update this blog and Blogspot simultaneously. How frequently or for how long is a mystery even to me!

So coming to the subject matter, a small observation few years ago led me to a conclusion (which may be obvious to many people) - the reason people of different communities eat different kinds of foods may be more because of geographical conditions of their place of origin or occupation of their ancestors.
The event that brought me to this conclusion was that on a trip to Dubai desert safari, at evening it was very cold, yet I had a cold drink and it didn’t hurt my health. On the other hand, having a cold drink on a cold night in India made me sick. So what was the difference? My dinner that night on Dubai was mostly chicken, in India it was veg. The heat generated by eating meat keeps you fit in cold conditions. Pondering on this I realized some points. Pls. note that following are the conventional trends. I do not imply that everyone of these communities follows these today.

Case 1: Muslims eating halaal meat — Islam originated in middle east where
a) Desert region used to be really cold at night and the heat generated by eating meat helps survival
b) There was scarce vegetation and hence no many vegetarian options.
c) In desert day, normal meat would quickly go bad due to heat. Halaal involves draining all blood from the meat which increases the shelf life of the food.

Case 2: Sikhs eating meat —
a) Punjab is a cold region and eating meat helps. Similar for alcohol consumption.
b) Punjabis are known for being hard workers and for that physical output, non veg helps in building physical strength.

Case 3: Brahmins being fruitarians/strict vegetarians while kshatriyas consumed non veg food —
Now here, some vegetarians tend to think of eating non-veg as being impure from a religious point of view and hence brahmins being pure vegetarians. This doesn’t make any sense. God made everything in the world, how is anything pure or impure in his eyes? Also, god made us omnivores, and also gave us the survival instincts which made us most powerful beings. So the evident reason why brahmins actually did not eat non veg food, in my opinion, should be:
a) Conventionally, brahmin dharma was to engage in worship, teaching and research. All of these activities are such that not much physical activity is involved. In such a case, digestion of meat is difficult. This brings obesity and a lot of problems.
b) Since a lot of intellectual work was needed, simple satvik food with high vitamin concentration helped.
On the other hand, kshatriyas were warriors and needed to be physical strong and active. The high proteins in meat helped them build physical strength and it was also not difficult to digest because of their regular physical training.

So I suppose if we look at customs with a logical perspective, we may end up finding things like these.