I’m preparing for competitive entrance-exams

Around 1.2 million students write the JEE exam each-year. It’s really tough to get a good rank: this is not like your school exams where you study for a subject and get graded periodically at school. There’s months & years worth of practice as you’re no longer competing locally. You’d need to be in the top 99.5%(ile) to qualify for a CSE course at Government colleges.

I’ll be focusing more on text posts, back to blogging & learning C++ during the latter half of the year. Good videos take time to produce, something that’s hard to do when you’re editing on a broken [16:8.9956076] display. The videos, feel better in my head :^

I’m taking a break from PeerTube & Odysee

I’m not that happy with the past few videos I’ve published; I feel I’m making videos in a hurry. Hopefully, I’ll cope up with school work this year and find pockets of time to make videos. Let’s see how that goes?

I’ve joined a local JEE coaching centre to help me with that. Focusing all you’ve got in these 2 years is a good investment. Every mark counts, for every wrong question you lose -10 ranks — assuming you’re in that 150+/300 bucket in your JEE Mains exam. The exam is set to start in Jan 2023 ~ 18 months from now. After that I’ll get into college, meet people who are interested in the same things, build things even faster! I think it’s probably a good compromise missing out on some things right now.

Another goal to tick off my bucketlist ✅

to learn from the best hackers (clever people) in the realm of Computer Science & Research

To do that — it means working with people from the best colleges in India like the NITs, IIITs & IITs of India. Possibly, I can get help via college connects & professors on campus. I don’t exactly know if Computer Science is the way I want to go, probably one of the circuital branches. I like the research side of things and not just the coding part of it just to impress someone in a FAANG interview.

I don’t wanna work a 9-5 job for for some random big-tech company. That sucks, for the effort I’ve put in this far. Most people just take CS for the money 🤑. The particular combo is uncertain ~ I am flexible, as long as I can apply whatever I’ve learnt in CS. Making apps? managing servers? DevOps? Biotech? Hardware/Electronics design, or pure theoretical computing research, I don’t know. JEE is one way to get into these universities. Even though it means excelling in standardized tests with the subjects that have little to (no) relation to CS, like Chemistry, Physics and some parts of Math. The Indian Education System is a joke.

Asking a fish, to climb a tree

There’s no-other option for me, some of my friends have gone abroad because they can afford it / parents got jobs (visas) or have had citizenship by birth. Frankly, my government does not care about education in the same way they care about elections. Everything in the education system happens on it’s own.

There’s the infamous ‘coaching’ industry to induct more and more kids for after-school classes and now, integrated classroom programs; where 12h work days are the norm (6h of school, 6h of JEE coaching classes till 8:00 PM). There’s always a star performer in that 1.2 million crowd — natural selection!

I haven’t found any other way to get in to college. So JEE prep is what I’ll be focussing on for the next 2 years. If you’ve no clue about the Indian education system, this video accurately describes what millions of Indian teenagers are going through right now

Totally different from 10th grade

Last year sucked. The pandemic had affected our learning environment, physical schools were redundant. I never went for an offline class the whole of last year! There was zero emphasis on live classes or laboratory classes, like I had 2 years ago (9th grade). I still remember those days, there was no need for proprietary apps like OneNote, Google Classroooms and (whatever they use nowadays) it’s not going to replace the good old chalk & board we used to use in the offline class.

As far as school there was no proper guidance / a bridging or career counselling session. You’d have to figure it out by yourself. You’re at the verge of turning 18. Time to run in the rat-race. At least back in high-school there was an emphasis on humane, holistic growth with regular extra-curricular activities like essay competitions, programming competitions, music & drama fests. Where you could enjoy, get good grades and be happy about your achievements. The teachers were wholesome & supportive and the environment didn’t really pressurize you.

Let’s hope things get better — here’s a short video of Diesel

Reminder: Today is a good day to #degoogle and delete your Google account. After the update to Google Photos / YouTube Ads ToS. And congratulations you’ve probably wasted half of 2021. 😮‍💨 How did your year go?