Its not tough to begin this... It was my first day of a PhD course. I mean one of the regular course you have to take for the PhD, not the 1st day of starting PhD officially. :) I know , I have to explain this. I started the work on my PhD Thesis even before I was officially registered and much before I started this particular lecture course.
The lecture started with a comic note. As it was a video conference lecture between IST, Lisbon & Univ of Porto & CMU , it took almost 30 minutes to setup the whole thing in the conference room so that all students at these 3 places could see and listen to the professor and the slides.
The course content, I wont go into details but deals with some extraordinary level of pure mathematics and challenges that ...ohh my friend there is no prerequisite for this course. well I too hope so, although the first lecture proved to be quite palatable.
After the lecture, I returned to my office(6th floor) for a little chat with one of my friends in the office and was then planning to go to my lab(8th floor). Then there was this abrupt moment...I was narrating some joke and suddenly felt an absolute silence in the office. There are 4 of us in that office room and they all at once started to concentrate on their monitor screens and stopped listening to me. I turned my head and in a proximity of about 20 cm, found my supervisor standing. He is also supervisisng other guys in my office. 1st reaction : thank god!!! the joke was of techincal genre. 2nd reaction : Why is everyone suddenly posing that they are extremely busy....
Only later did I realize that I was the scapegoat for the day. I was asked to hurriedly prepare a presentation in next 48 hours for an all-lab-seminar. There was this rumour going on that someone needs to do a presentation in this seminar, before I was cought. Well in the quick frenzy of that moment, I could say nothing but..."yes sir!"....6 months work and 48 hours to prepare for 30 minutes of presentation. Thats certainly unfair, but its fair when i start thinking of 4 years of grad work and just 1 hour of thesis defence.
With all this patience of waiting for the new fund to get on paper and living merely by the support of a credit card for last couple of weeks , 2 papers lined up for the end of this month...house rent delayed for January, posing like a helpless sheep infront of the lanlord and hours of toil with the robot which takes a hell lot of time to understand the color and sign of his team mate's jersy (robots playing soccer), do they promise a real royal life after I graduate....Can anyone answer that?
