Grad life @ Purdue

Woaaah! Finally got some breathing time to sit and write my blog. Graduate life!! Things have begun so quickly and I’m surged into the current of research in such a way that there was hardly any time to think about anything else or give myself that “slow start” cushion. Days and nights are just passing by. Every day there are these small tasks that need to be done which if carried over to the next day could turn out to be a BIG problem. Everything spoken to everyone, every little detail, needs to noted, carefully calculated and made sure that it fits your schedule. Any task be it personal or professional needs to be done with royal time management. Well it’s more like doing professional work and then accommodating the personal chores within howsoever less free time you get.

Returning to Purdue has been great. Being an intern here has helped a lot to get me adjusted to everything so very quickly that I have hardly wasted any time figuring out the way of life here. Starting with my apartment I guess I have made an excellent choice this time especially when the name of the apartment complex is a French one ;) Beau Jardin Apartments is a very well connected complex to Purdue with Payless supermarket right next to it and all the junk food chains around the supermarket. Basically you can never go hungry there. Also, some of the most important roads like the Northwestern Avenue and Salisbury Street are cutting across this area which makes the busses easily available. It’s great to have 2 apartment-mates, one being the brother of my batchmate from IIT Guwahati and the other is his friend with whom I met for the first time and realized he is too paranoid about insects in the house apparently from his past experiences. This led him to give me a lengthy explanation about how things are to be kept in the house and how I am supposed to wash off everything in the kitchen ASAP. It was quite interesting and funny as I was remembering my mom just a week ago giving me the same instructions whilst I am living in the States. Nevertheless, we landed up having a good conversation and I realized he has a healthy way of life so I just expressed my wish of being healthy too and most probably join the gym. It all went well.

Being to Europe for an exchange semester and then returning to IIT Guwahati and then to Pune and then flying to US was really tiring. Everything just went very fast. I had left all my scholarship in the European bank as I was waiting for one last payment and then I had asked the banker to transfer it to my US account. France did not fail to disappoint me one last time. The banker did not transfer the money which resulted in me being a pauper in the States with hardly any cash to buy even food. Luckily some good friends in US and in France facilitated the process and I received my wire after a week. With the account decent, I finally went to the supermarket and by now I was used to the huge markets with infinite useless options for infinite useless things. I saw ice creams of course and decided to buy two tubs of them ( What? They are just for 5$ here!! ) It was death by chocolate of course and I went back home and was relaxing during the weekend coolly enjoying the taste of USA when my roommate (the paranoid one) came and asked me for a taste of the ice cream. Very happily I shared the tub and he approach the tub with his spoon looked into it and just smashed the tub on the kitchen table looked at me and started laughing. This is by far the weirdest scene that has happened with me. I looked at him bewildered and stunned and of course I asked him “Whaaaaaaaaaaaat?!!” He looked at me, still trying to control his laugh and told me, “I thought you were worried about your health and all.” I had absolutely no clue what he meant by that and I was like “Yeah, of course I am” to which he very amusingly expressed that finishing half a tub of ice cream in a day is gonna take me very close to my aims, just hypothetically. In that very moment a gush of embarrassment, horror and sadness engulfed me. I can never forget that moment. It was that day I had decided to turn that wish into a reality and actually do something about my health and live a healthier life. A lot of past experiences in my life have given me enough reason to believe that health is the biggest priority however nothing ever pushed me that hard to actually go and do something about it. That moment. That very laugh was and is a very strong motivation for me to continue gymming and I am glad that since then I have hardly been eating junk food or unhealthy stuff. My food intake and eating habits have changed drastically coming here and I am so very thankful to Mr. Lalit for this. He is like the Dark Knight roommate. Not the one you need but the one you deserve. :P My other roommate is as cool as a cucumber. Well, he is a PhD student. ‘Nuff said! I am glad I was able to find three other really amazing set of people in Beau Jardin –Shitty, Aalu and Pahrool who are becoming really good friends with time. The Lake Michigan trip organized by the ISS at Purdue kick started a series of events which led to finding friends like John, Shitty, Aalu, Parul, Akancha, Alper, Diogo, Felipe etc.

Regarding my lab and my research group, I am super happy and excited to be a part of DELP which is such a dynamic design group at Purdue. Some faces are familiar and some are new. Everyone seems to have blended really well. Working on interesting topics like game theory, economics, design innovation and getting to know more about cryptography, 3D printing, crowd sourcing etc. There is so much to learn and so much to read and so less time. Things are going well. Super hectic but so so so glad to be doing something worthwhile. As for now, 6 days to go for the next stipend and then party wohhuu ;) Cheers!