Category: IIT

Numbers and management

I learnt Opeations Research thrice. The first was when I had just finished school and was about to go to IIT. My father had just started on a part-time MBA, and his method of making sure he had learnt something properly was to try and teach it to me. And so, using some old textbook he had bought some twenty years earlier, he taught me how to solve the transportation problem. I had already learnt to solve 2-variable linear programming problems in school (so yes, I learnt OR 4 times then). And my father taught my how to solve 3-variable problems using the Simplex table.

I got quite good at it, but by not using it for the subsequent two years I forgot. And then I happened to take Operations Research as a minor at IIT. And so in my fifth semester I learnt the basics again. I was taught by the highly rated Prof. G Srinivasan. He lived up to his rating. Again, he taught us simplex, transportation and assignment problems, among other things. He showed us how to build and operate the simplex table. It was fun, and surprisingly (in hindsight) never once did I consider it to be laborious.

This time I didn’t forget. OR being my minor meant that I had OR-related courses in the following three semesters, and I liked it enough to even considering applying for a PhD in OR. Then I got cold feet and decided to do an MBA instead, and ended up at IIMB. And there I learnt OR for the fourth time.

The professor who taught us wasn’t particularly reputed, and she lived up to her not-so-particular-reputation. But there was a difference here. When we got to the LP part of the course (it was part of “Quantitative Methods 2”, which included regression and OR), I thought I would easily ace it, given my knowledge of simplex. Initially I was stunned to know that we wouldn’t be taught the simplex. “What do they teach in an OR course if they don’t teach Simplex”, I thought. Soon I would know why. Computer!

We were all asked to install this software called Lindo on our PCs, which would solve any linear programming problem you would throw at it, in multiple dimensions. We also discovered that Excel had the Solver plugin. With programs like these, what use of knowing the Simplex? Simplex was probably useful back in the day when readymade algorithms were not available. Also, IIT being a technical school might have seen value in teaching us the algorithm (though we always solved procedurally. I never remember writing down pseudocode for simplex). The business school would have none of it.

It didn’t matter how the problem was actually solved, as long as we knew how to use the solver. What was more important was the art of transforming a real-life problem into one that could be solved using Solver/Lindo. In terms of formulation, the problems we got in our assignments and exams were  tough – back in IIT when we solved manually such problems were out of bounds since Simplex would take too long on those.

I remember taking a few more quant electives at IIM. They were all the same – some theory would be taught where we knew something about the workings of some of the algorithms, but the focus was on applications. How do you formulate a business problem in a way in which you can use the particular technique? How do you decide what technique you use for what problem? These were some of the questions I learnt to answer through the course of my studies at IIM.

I once interviewed with a (now large) marketing analytics firm in Bangalore. They expected me to know how to measure “feelings” and other BS so I politely declined after one round. From what I understood, they had two kinds of people. First they had experienced marketers who would do the “business end” of the problem. Then they had stats/math grads who actually solved the problem. I think that is problematic. But as I have observed in a few other places, that is the norm.

You have tech guys doing absolutely tech stuff and reporting to business guys who know very little of the tech. Because of the business guy’s disinterest in tech, he is unlikely to get his hands dirty with the data. And is likely to take what the tech guy gives him at face value. As for the tech guy doing the data work, he is unlikely to really understand the business problem that he is solving, and so he invariably ends up solving a “tech problem”, which may or may not have business implications.

There are times when people ask me if I “know big data”. When I reply in the negative, they wonder (sometimes aloud) how I can call myself a data scientist. Then there are times when people ask me about a particular statistical technique. Again, it is extremely likely I answer in the negative, and extremely likely they wonder how I call myself a data scientist.

My answer is that if I deem a problem to be solvable by a particular technique, I can then simply read up on the technique! As long as you have the basics right, you don’t need to mug up all available techniques.

Currently I’m working (for a client) on a problem that requires me to cluster data (yes, I know that much stats to know that now the next step is to cluster). So this morning I decided to read up on some clustering algorithms. I’m amazed at the techniques that are out there. I hadn’t even heard of most of them. Then I read up on each of them and considered how well they would fit my data. After reading up, and taking another look at the data, I made what I think is an informed choice. And selected a technique which I think was appropriate. And I had no clue of the existence of the technique two hours before.

Given that I solve business problems using data, I make sure I use techniques that are appropriate to solve the business problem. I know of people who don’t even look at the data at hand and start implementing complex statistical techniques on them. In my last job (at a large investment bank), I know of one guy who suggested five methods  (supposedly popular statistical techniques – I had never heard of them; he had a PhD in statistics) to attack a particular problem, without having even seen the data! As far as he was concerned he was solving a technical problem.

Now that this post is turning out to be an advertisement for my consulting services, let me go all the way. Yes, I call myself a “management consultant and data scientist”. I’m both a business guy and a data guy. I don’t know complicated statistical techniques, but don’t see the need to know either – since I usually have the internet at hand while working. I solve business problems using data. The data is only an intermediary step. The problem definition is business-like. As is the solution. Data is only a means.

And for this, I have to thank the not-so-highly-reputed professor who taught me Operations Research for the fourth time – who taught me that it is not necessary to know Simplex (Excel can do it), as long as you can formulate the problem properly.

Mike Denness and WTC Bombers

Professors who are insecure with respect to their ability and competence demand, rather than command respect. They institute complicated procedures which ensure that students need to suck up to them. Professors who know they are good don’t care. For example, the better professors who taught me at IIT never took attendance (everybody would be marked present), and would yet lecture to a full house most of the time. Lesser professors would get finicky about attendance. And other such trivial things. By forcing students to do things in a certain way, by “being strict”, they assumed, that students would respect them. It is a wonder that none of them thought this might be counterproductive.

In our third semester at IIT, we had this course called “Digital logic and VLSI Design Lab”. It was a decent and useful course. You would build digital circuits and test them out. No rocket science to it, but something that was useful in the long run. And because there was no rocket science to it, the faculty (one of the more insecure professors) had instituted a complicated process so that he gets some respect (or attention at least). Actually it wasn’t that complex. Before an experiment, we had to write up about the circuit and how we go about the experiment and get his signature on our write up. The lab assistant had been instructed that we should be issued components only after our report had been countersigned by the professor. Nothing too complicated, but a small step to ensure we suck up to him.

Things were mostly smooth, but one day the professor was late to arrive. Or maybe he was there and we didn’t see him – I don’t remember correctly. I don’t know how it happened but we managed to get the components from the lab assistant without our report having been countersigned by the professor. In a jiffy (after all we were three bright IIT boys) we had finished the experiment. And we called the professor to show him the results.

The experiment didn’t matter to him. He didn’t care one bit about the elegant circuit we had constructed. He only looked at our write up. His signature was missing. And he went wild. I won’t get into the details here but he went absolutely ballistic and threatened to annul our experiment, and possibly even fail the three of us in that course. “Such indiscipline is not to be tolerated”, he said.

“Sir, but this is not fair”, a teammate interjected. It only ensured that the professor went even more ballistic. “You guys must be reading the newspapers”, he thundered. “You see what is happening in South Africa? Is that fair? There is absolutely no fairness in this world, so you won’t get any brownie points by arguing that something is not fair” (the professor was a big cricket fan. The events in South Africa pertained to the one match suspension of Virender Sehwag and a suspended sentence to six other Indians, handed out by match referee Mike Denness).

“I don’t want my students to be this indisciplined”, he went on. “You never know where this will take you, if it is not nipped in the bud. One day you will do your experiment without taking my signature. When that is tolerated, you get encouraged to more indiscipline. And so it grows. And one day you will be bombing the WTC”. None of the three of us was able to react to this (this was in October 2001).

I don’t exactly remember how it ended. If I remember right, we had to dismantle our set up, take the professor’s signature on our write up, re-issue the components and re-do the experiment – but I’m not sure – maybe we were let off. But it was an important lesson for us – if indiscipline is not checked right up front, you could go on to be a terrorist it seems!

Brand dilution at IIT/IIM

At the Aditya Birla Scholarship party on Saturday, one topic which a lot of people spoke about was about reservations at IITs and IIMs, and the consequent increase in batch size. The general consensus was about reservation being a bad thing and about the strain that is being put on the faculty at IIMs because of the sudden increase in batch size.

As the discussion continued, one popular thread that emerged was about “brand dilution”. About how with people with significantly inferior credentials getting degrees from IITs and IIMs, the brand of these institutes was getting diluted. At that point I disagreed, and I thought I should blog what I said.

The brand of a college that you go to, I said, is useful only for those people who lack a personal brand, and instead try to lean on to brands of institutes they are associated with as a crutch. If you want to really make a name for yourself, I said, you should let go of your institutional crutches and build your own brand. And if you have the self-confidence to do that, the brand of the college you went to shouldn’t matter.

That pretty much ended that discussion right there. What do you think about it? Should we be unduly worried about the “brand value” of the institutions we went to? Or of the companies we work at? Where does leaning on to our “portfolio of brands” stop and creation of our own brand begin?

Coming to think of it now, you can define the brand value of an institution as some sort of a weighted sum of the brand values of people associated with that institution. Right now I’m not bothered about the distribution of those weights. However, irrespective of how the weights are distributed, unless each and every person associated with the institute has equal brand value, there exists at least one person whose brand value is higher than that of the brand value of the institution, and at least one person whose brand value is lower than that of the institution (I’m not bothered about a formal proof of this now, but I guess it is intuitive. Section formulae and all that).

Without loss of generality, we can say that in the universe of people associated with an institution, there is a non-zero set of people whose personal brand values are superior to that of the institution and a non-zero set of people whose personal brand values are inferior to that of the institution. Now, which of these two groups, do you think, would be more likely to want to use the institute’s brand value as a crutch? And which of these two groups would be more concerned about “preserving the institute’s brand value”? I guess that explains why the discussion ended when I said what I said at the party on Saturday.

PS: my apologies if that last bit sounded arrogant.

 

Elite institutions and mental illness

At the Aditya Birla scholarship function last night, I met an old professor, who happened to remember me. We were exchanging emails today and he happened to ask me about one of my classmates, who passed away last year. In reply to him I went off on a long rant about the incidence of mental illness in institutions such as IIT. Some of what I wrote, I thought, deserved a wider audience, so I’m posting an edited version here. I’ve edited out people’s names to protect their privacy. 

****
<name blanked out 1> passed away a year and a half back. He had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and was also suffering from depression, and he committed suicide. He had been living in Bangalore in his last days, working with an IT company here. I had invited him for my wedding a couple of months before that, but had got no response from him.
He was the third person that our 30-odd strong Computer Science class from IIT Madras lost. Prior to that another of our classmates had killed himself, and he too was known to be suffering from some form of mental illness. The third was a victim of a motorcycle accident.
I’m quite concerned about the incidence of mental illness among elite students. From my IIT Madras Computer Science class alone, I know at least six people who at some point of time or the other have been diagnosed with mental illness. I myself have been under treatment for depression and ADHD since January this year. And I don’t think our class is a particularly skewed sample.
I think this is a manner of great concern, and doesn’t get the attention that it deserves. I don’t know if there are some systemic issues that are causing this, but losing graduates of elite institutions to mental illness is I think a gross wastage of resources! I don’t know what really needs to be done, but I think one thing that is certainly going to help is to set up on-campus psychiatric and counselling services (manned by trained professionals; I know IIT Madras has a notional “guidance and counselling unit” but I’m not sure what kind of counseling they’re really capable of) , and to encourage students to seek help when they sense a problem.
Of course, there are other constraints at play here – firstly there is a shortage of trained psychiatrists in India. I remember reading a report somewhere that compared to international standards, India has only one third of the number of psychiatrists it requires. More importantly, there is the social stigma related to mental illness which prevents people from seeking professional help (I must admit that I faced considerable opposition from my own family when I wanted to consult a psychiatrist), and sometimes by the time people do get help, irreparable damage might have been done in terms of career. Having read up significantly on mental illnesses for a few months now, and looking back at my own life, I think I had been depressed ever since 2000, when I joined IIT. And it took over 11 years before I sought help and got it diagnosed. Nowadays, I try to talk about my mental illness in public forums, to try and persuade people that there is nothing shameful in being mentally ill, and to encourage them to seek help as soon as possible when they think they have a problem.
I’m really sorry I’ve gone off on a tangent here but this is a topic that I feel very strongly about, and got reminded about when I started thinking about <name blanked out 1>….
****
I know that several universities abroad offer free psychiatric support to students, and I know a number of friends who have taken advantage of such programs and gotten themselves diagnosed, and are leading significantly better lives now. I don’t really know how to put it concisely but if you think you suffer from some mental illness, I do encourage you to put aside the stigmas of yourself and your family, and go ahead and seek help. 

Sponsorship Cannibalism

Back in 2004 Shamanth, Bofi, Anshumani and I started the IIT Madras Open Quiz. In some ways it was a response to critics of IITM quizzing, who blamed our quizzes for being too long, too esoteric, too disorganized and the likes. It was also an effort to take IITM quizzing to a wider audience, for till then most quizzes that IITM hosted were limited to college participants only. An open quiz hosted by the institute, and organized professionally would go a long way in boosting the institute’s reputation in quizzing, we reasoned.

Shamanth had a way with the institute authorities and it wasn’t very difficult to convince them regarding the concept. We hit a roadblock, however, when we realized that organizing a “professionally organized” quiz was a big deal, and would cost a lot of money, which means we had to raise sponsorship. And this is where our troubles started.

The first bunch of people we approached to help with sponsorship were the Saarang (IITM Fest) sponsorship coordinators, who had so successfully raised tens of lakhs for the just-concluded Saarang. Raising the one lakh or so that we needed would be child’s play for them, we reasoned. However, it was not to be. While the coordinators themselves were quite polite and promised to help, we noticed that there was no effort in that direction. Later it transpired that the cultural secretaries and the core group (let’s call them the Cultural Committee for the purpose of this post)  had forbidden them from helping us out. Raising sponsorship for an additional event would cannibalize Saarang sponsorship, we were told.

When we needed volunteers to run the show, again we found that the Saarang “GA Coordinators” (GA = General Arrangements; these guys were brilliant at procuring and arranging for just about anything) had been forbidden from working with us. The Cultural Committee wanted to send out a strong signal that they did not encourage the institute holding any external “cultural” events that were outside of its domain. It was after much hostel-level bullying that we got one “GA guy” to do the arrangements for the quiz. As for the sponsorship, we tapped some institute budget, and the dean helped us out by tapping his contacts at TCS (for the next few years it was called the TCS IITM Open Quiz).

One reason the quiz flourished was that in the following couple of years, the organizers of the quiz had close links with the cultural committee – one of the quizmasters of the second and third editions of the quiz himself being a member of the said committee. This helped the quiz to get a “lucrative” date (October 2nd – national holidays are big days for quizzing in Chennai), and despite being organized by students, it became a much sought after event in South Indian quizzing circles. Trouble started again, however, after the link between the quizmasters and the cultural committee were broken.

The Cultural Committee once again started viewing this quiz as a threat to Saarang, and did their best to scuttle it. The quiz was moved around the calendar – thus losing its much-coveted October 2nd spot, and soon discontinued altogether. Despite significant protests from the external quizzing community and alumni, there was no sign of the quiz re-starting. Finally when the cultural committee accepted, it was under the condition that the quiz be a part of Saarang itself. After significant struggle, finally a bunch of enterprising volunteers organized the quiz this year after a long hiatus. It is not known how much support they received from the cultural people.

The point I’m trying to make is that when you have one lucrative product (in this case Saarang), it is in your interest to kill all products which could potentially be a competitor to this product, which explains the behaviour of the IITM Cultural Committee towards the Open Quiz. And it is the same point that explains why Test cricket in India is languishing, with bad scheduling (Tests against the West Indies started on Mondays), bad grounds, expensive tickets and the likes. The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) now has one marquee “product”, the Indian Premier League (IPL). The IPL is the biggest cash cow for the BCCI, and the board puts most of its efforts in generating sponsorship for that event. And as a side effect, it does its best to ensure that most of the premium sponsorship comes to the IPL, and thus the stepmotherly treatment of other “properties” including domestic cricket.

Last evening, I was wondering what it would take for the BCCI to make a big deal of the Ranji trophy, with national team members present, good television coverage and the kind of glamour we associate with the IPL. And then I realized this was wishful thinking, for the BCCI would never want to dilute the IPL brand. Have you heard of a tournament called the Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy? It is the domestic inter-state T20 competition. A potential moneyspinner, you would think, if all national team members are available. But do you know that last year the final stages of this competition coincided with the World Cup? I’m not joking here.

I’m sure you can think of several other similar examples (Bennett Coleman and Company’s purchase and subsequent discontinuation of “Vijay Times” also comes to mind). And the one thing it implies is that it’s bad news for niches. For they will begin to be seen as competition for the “popular” brand which is probably owned by the same owners, and they will be discouraged.

 

MENSA

Vinod Ganesh is popularly known as MENSA, in Chennai quizzing and other circles. He attained his MENSA membership sometime in 2003-04. The exam (yeah, since it’s a high IQ society, you need to pass an exam to join) was sometime in late 2003 or early 2004, and the results arrived during Saarang 2004. Thinking back, there is a possibility that the nickname could have been mine (though “Wimpy” was well-established by then). I’d also taken the same exam on the same day as Vinod did, and had cracked it. It remains one of the turning points in my life.

I was studying Computer Science at IIT Madras, and was in my final year of the course. Most of the class wanted to go to the US to do their masters, and along came a rumour (possibly substantiated given how universities in America work) that membership of elite clubs such as MENSA was a good bullet point that might enable admission, and offers of aid. Most of my classmates had signed up enthusiastically. The rumour had misled me, in the sense that I had assumed there was little to the exam apart from a bullet point for foreign apps, and had stayed away.

It was a Saturday, and the entrance test was going to happen over three sessions. MENSA entrance is one of those tests where they “recycle” question papers – the papers are taken back at the end of the test, and given out to the next batch. The nature of questions allows them to do this – they are mostly pattern recognition, and are quite hard to “describe” in the absence of the question paper. Sometimes someone else who took the test prior to you would have made marks on the question paper, but it is best you disregard them, for you never know how well they’ve done.

Friends who had written the test in the first batch told me that it was a tough exam. That it was all about pattern recognition and stuff. They also mentioned that for the third session, seats weren’t filled up and they were still taking on-the-spot registrations. I think the entrance fee was a hundred bucks or so, and I made a spur of the moment decision to write the test.

IIT was a hard time for me. For most of my time there, my confidence was at an all-time low. Except for one term, I never did well in academics. Extra curricular activities also floundered, and I would find myself wasting phenomenal amounts of time. I had developed a fear that I wasn’t good enough, and it was feeding onto itself and making things worse. Given my indifferent performances both in class and outside, my peers, too, didn’t have too much respect for me (IIT is strictly meritocratic that way, I must tell you), and that only contributed to my self-doubt. Given that I was going to graduate soon, I knew I needed a stimulus to break out of my rut, and so far hadn’t figured a way out.

MENSA, the exam that I had enrolled for in the last minute, unexpectedly proved to provide the stimulus. It turned out that in my entire Computer Science class (most of whom were double digit rankers in the IIT-JEE, and half of whom had better CGPAs than me), I was the only person to have qualified the MENSA test. I remember a couple of others coming close. Most, including a number of the top rankers in class, hadn’t even come close to qualifying. If my confidence levels were higher earlier, I might have yelled out a “howzzat”. In the event, I didn’t require it, since the success in the exam was enough of a stimulus for me to do well in CAT, which followed, and generally break out of the rut.

In the event, I ended up not joining MENSA. I got a letter asking me to come for a welcome party, where I had to pay a fee to become a lifetime member of MENSA Chennai. I knew I was going to move out of Chennai in about three months’ time, and I thought it would be a waste to become a life member of the Chennai chapter. I remember writing to the Bangalore chapter after I moved back, but the responses were vague, and I never joined. That letter from MENSA which declares my success in the examination, though, sits proudly in my “certificates folder”. And for some three years hence, the fact that I had cracked the MENSA entrance test had adorned my resume.

I’ve never been an “RG” (IIT term for someone who doesn’t hesitate to pull others back in order to get ahead of them), but in this one situation, I had taken great pleasure in my classmates’ failure to qualify for MENSA. For a good reason, I think, since that was responsible in setting me off on a successful run that would last close to two years.

Common kids versus coaching factories

Given that I can consider it as my “specialist subject” I continue to comment on entrance exams. Glanced through an article about changes in medical entrance exams today in the newspaper, which talked about “eliminating negative marking”, and also talked about having a common entrance exams for all colleges (didn’t read in enough detail to figure out the details).

Now, when you have a broad-based entrance exam which is supposed to cater to people of varying backgrounds, there is a need to keep it simple. There is a need to announce a “syllabus”, and stick to it. And to pre-announce a format which will allow students to prepare adequately for the exam. The problem with this, however, is that it plays right into the hands of coaching factories, whose influence the examiners want to try and reduce. Given a syllabus and a format, it becomes easier to cram for an exam without understanding fundamentals, and this is what coaching schools want.

When the format of the examination is unknown, it becomes harder to “prepare for the exam”, and all one can do is to “prepare the concepts”. In theory, a random examination format allows the examiner to examine concepts better, and doesn’t give unfair advantage to people who go to coaching factories.

That makes me wonder if the attempt to make heavily-coached entrance exams “easier” (this applies to IIT admissions also) can be explained with a baptists-and-bootleggers argument. The baptists in this case are the inclusionists, who want to keep entrance exam papers simple and reasonably deterministic so that “common kids” are not disadvantaged. The bootleggers are the coaching factories, since a deterministic exam will make it easier to coach and thus increase their demand.

For the same reasons, the move to using board exam scores for IIT admissions is daft. Board exams are inherently designed to make people pass, which means they have a defined syllabus and a deterministic format. Use of that for something as competitive as IIT admissions is only going to play into the hands of coaching factories.

Going to Chennai

There’s something about traveling to Chennai that depresses me. Usually I’m a big fan of traveling, at least I think I am. Usually, before any trip, when I’m getting ready to leave, I feel happy. There’s some kind of happy expectation that there’s going to be lots of fun to be had in the trip. Except, when I’m going to Chennai.

I’ll be leaving home in about an hour’s time to catch a bus to Chennai. We’ll be there for a day and a half, and I’ll be meeting lots of people and hopefully having a good time. There’s nothing inherently unpleasant or uncertain about this trip. Heck, we’re even going to get picked up at the bus stand by someone holding my name board – it doesn’t get better than that.

But still, I’m not at my most cheerful. There’s something that’s making me feel sad. That’s because I’m going to Chennai. Oh, and I should mention one thing. I feel this way only when I’m taking an overnight train or bus to go there. The times when I’ve caught the early morning Shatabdi to get there (of late, that’s my most preferred means of transportation to Chennai) I’ve felt quite happy and upbeat.

I think it’s the association with college. I think I’ve mentioned here that I don’t count my years at IIT as my happiest. I was an inherently troubled soul back in those days, and the only thing that I would look forward to back then was the monthly trip back home. And when that trip back home was over and it was time to go back, gloom would descend.

I remember it would be the same dinner my mother would make every time I’d to take the overnight train. There was this fixed time we’d leave home, and the same route we’d take to the station. And till about a year or so back, when I started taking that route quite frequently (for different purposes of course), traveling towards Majestic via Bull Temple Road and Goods Shed Road would remind me of those days when I’d be going back to Chennai.

A lot of things have changed. On most occasions my trips to Chennai nowadays are for happy purposes. Yet, when it’s late night and I’ve to leave for Chennai there’s a vague feeling. That lump in the throat. There’s a bottle of Thums Up that the wife has just placed on my table. Hopefully consuming it will clear the lump.

Why You Should Not Do An Undergrad in Computer Science at IIT Madras

I did my undergrad in Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Madras. My parents wanted me to study Electrical Engineering, but I had liked programming back in school, and my JEE rank “normally” “implied” Computer Science and Engineering. So I just went with the flow and joined the course. In the short term, I liked some subjects, so I was happy with my decision. Moreover there was a certain aura associated with CS students back in IITM, and I was happy to be a part of it. In the medium term too, the computer science degree did open doors to a few jobs, and I’m happy for that. And I still didn’t regret my decision.

Now, a full seven years after I graduated with my Bachelors, I’m not so sure. I think I should’ve gone for a “lighter” course, but then no one told me. So the thing with a B.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Madras is that it is extremely assignment incentive. Computer Science is that kind of a subject, there is very little you can learn in the classroom. The best way to learn stuff is by actually doing stuff, and “lab” is cheap (all you need is a bunch of computers) so most courses are filled with assignments. Probably from the fourth semester onwards, you spend most of your time doing assignments. Yes, you do end up getting good grades on an average, but you would’ve worked for it. And there’s no choice.

The thing with an Undergrad is that you are clueless. You have no clue what you’re interested in, what kind of a career you want to pursue, what excites you and the stuff. Yes, you have some information from school, from talking to seniors and stuff, but still it’s very difficult to KNOW when you are seventeen as to what you want to do in life. From this perspective, it is important for your to keep your options as open as they can be.

Unfortunately most universities in India don’t allow you to switch streams midway through your undergrad (most colleges are siloed into “arts” or “engineering” or “medicine” and the like). IIT Madras, in fact, is better in that respect since it allows you to choose a “minor” stream of study and courses in pure sciences and the humanities. But still, it is impossible for you to change your stream midway. So how do you signal to the market that you are actually interested in something else?

One way is by doing projects in areas that you think you are really interested in. Projects serve two purposes – first they allow you to do real work in the chosen field, and find out for yourself if it interests you. And if it does interest you, you have an automatic resume bullet point to pursue your career on that axis. Course-related projects are fine but since they’re forced, you have no way out, and they will be especially unpleasant if you happen to not like the course.

So why is CS@IITM a problem? Because it is so hectic, it doesn’t give you the time to pursue your other interests. It doesn’t offer you the kind of time that you need to study and take on projects in other subjects (yeah, it still offers you the 3 + 1 months of vacation per year, when you can do whatever you want, but then in the latter stages you’re so occupied with internships and course projects you’re better off having time during the term). So if you, like me, find out midway through the course that you would rather do something else, there is that much less time for you to explore around, study, and do projects in other subjects.

And there is no downside to joining a less hectic course. How hectic a course inherently is only sets a baseline. If you were to like the course, no one stops you from doing additional projects in the same subject. That way you get to do more of what you like, and get additional bullet points. All for the good, right?

After I graduated, IIT Madras reduced its credit requirement by one-twelfth. I don’t know how effective that has been in reducing the inherent workload of students but it’s a step in the right direction. Nevertheless, if you are going to get into college now, make sure you get into a less hectic course so that the cost of making a mistake in selection is not high.

In search of uncertainty

Back when I was in school, I was a math stud. At least people around me thought so. I knew I wanted to pursue a career in science, and that in part led me to taking science in class XI, and subsequently writing JEE which led to the path I ultimately took. Around the same time (when I was in high school), I started playing chess competitively. I was quite good at it, and I knew that with more effort I could make it big in the game. But then, that never happened, and given that I would fall sick after every tournament, I retired.

It was in 2002, I think, that I was introduced to contract bridge, and I took an instant liking for it. All the strategising and brainwork of chess would be involved once again, and I knew I’d get pretty good at this game, too. But there was one fundamental difference which made bridge so much more exciting – the starting position was randomized (I’m not making a case for Fischer Chess here, mind you). The randomization of starting positions meant that you could play an innumerable number of “hands” with the same set of people without ever getting bored. I simply loved it.

It was around that time that I started losing interest in math and other hard sciences. They had gotten to the point where they were too obscure, and boring, I thought, and that to make an impact in them, I wanted to move towards something less precise, and hard. That was probably what led me to do an MBA. And during the course of my MBA I discovered my interest in economics and social sciences, but am yet to do anything significant on that front, though, apart from the odd blog here or there.

I think what drove me from what I had thought is my topic of interest to what I think now it is is the nature of open problems. In hard sciences, where a lot of things are “known” it’s getting really hard to do anything of substance unless you get really deep in, into the territories of obscurity. In “fuzzy sciences”, on the other hand, nothing too much is “known”, and there will always be scope for doing good interesting work without it getting too obscure.

Similarly, finance, I thought, being a people-driven subject (the price of a stock is what a large set of people think its price is, there are no better models) will have lots of uncertainty, and scope to make assumptions, and thus scope to do good work without getting too obscure. But what I find is that given the influx of hard science grads in Wall Street over the last three decades, most of the large organizations are filled with people who simply choose to ignore the uncertainty and “interestingness” and instead try and solve deterministic problems based on models that they think completely represents the market.

And this has resulted in you having to do stuff that is really obscure and deep (like in the hard sciences) even in a non-deterministic field such as finance, simply because it’s populated by people from hard science background, and it takes way too much in order to go against the grain.

PS: Nice article by Tim Harford on why we can’t have any Da Vincis today. Broadly related to this, mostly on scientific research.