Memories from college days – PSG Tech

Maybe the greatest and best part of life is when we are young and happy and have no responsibilities in life, know? One such stage of life for me definitely were school and college days. Parents look after the major portion of our life and we are only expected to study and get good marks in school and college! (nice life, know?:))

College days:

Thinking in hindsight now, I think college days were so much of fun – though I thought that they were hard then! 🙂 I did my B. E. in Computer Science and Engineering from PSG College of Technology in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India. Let us see what made them memorable and fun! 🙂

1st year in college:

I had never stayed in a hostel and never away from my parents and sister and that was my first experience staying away from family. It was also quite unexpected that I moved into a hostel. The original thought was I might get admission into an Engineering college in Chennai itself. But fate had other plans and I landed up into exact college where my father dreamed that his daughters would study.

First year of college life is figuring out a lot of things on your own. Many things we often take for granted at home suddenly gain prominence in young adult life. Staying with five other roommates and having a shared washroom -life was definitely different and fun. I had soon made a lot of friends in my college and hostel.

There were no geysers to warm the water for bathing in the morning those days. We had to use immersion heaters to warm a bucket of water. The problem was 20 or 30 girls could not use an immersion heater individually (obviously! :)) Everybody was in a rush to leave for the class at 8:30 a.m. and all wanted to warm the water at the same time – around 7:45 or 8 a.m. ! (face palm!) So, what happens then? The power used to trip causing absolute mayhem and the water didn’t get hot for anybody. Finally, everybody troops in for their class at 8:30 a.m. either after taking a bath or without taking a bath!! 🙂

Luckily, I was in that stage of life when I used to get up early and finish my bath much earlier than others – so I did not encounter the “immersion heater” problem too much! 🙂 but it is fun to think about it now… 😉

First year of college life was also the first time when we get used to hostel food for the first time. There were “tech bullets”(for idli) and other nicknames for other foods. It was also the first time, we had to wait in long queues for getting dosas or puris.

Getting used to the young college slang, drinking coffee all the time at the cafeteria, and standing at the Xerox shop are all warm memories now!

2nd year in college:

By the time we were in 2nd year of college, we were fairly used to the environment and the routine. I was doing Computer Science and Engineering and academically, we were slowly introduced to the core subjects like Data Structures, Operating Systems.

Our hostel life of course was more fun and chaotic. We were still 5 girls in a room but this time I was with a different set of my friends. This year, we were paired with girls from our own branch. The water drama in the morning continued and we just took it in our stride! 🙂

There was only one television for the entire block and DD was only channel!! The Internet made its appearance in India only years later. So, all the hostelites trooped into see TV programs on the only channel that was available then – ‘Doordarshan’. There was amazing excitement to watch programs such as ‘Chitrahaar’ and ‘Oliyum Oliyum’!! 🙂

There were a lot of combined classes with the Electrical and Electronics(EEE) branch in the first year(maybe all classes were combined) The Computer Science branch got its own identity in the second year. It is to be noted that we were only the third batch of Computer Science and Engineering students. The syllabus was just getting formed and the Professors themselves were also just getting trained to teach us. But all said and done, they did a fabulous job of teaching us almost 30 years ago! 🙂

3rd year in college:

By the time I was in my 3rd year of college, I moved to a different block in the hostel and we were now only two of us in a room. This was much more quiet and calm and there was not much action now! 🙂 By now, we all had our own groups and friends circle.

The entire area(Peelamedu in Coimbatore) where my college was located only had hard water. The water was so hard, it was hard to believe that such water even existed. There was hardly any lather when we tried to apply soap. Forget about taking a normal bath, it was impossible to wash your hair with such a kind of water.

What was the solution to our hard water woes? Well, we used to have small water trucks carrying soft water to our hostels. We used to catch water in our buckets and use it. But how do we take the soft water to the third and fourth floor of our hostels? Well, we used to have a pulley and a bucket system and if we place our water in the bucket in the lower floor, we could pull it up to the upper floors! Well, isn’t that a fun thing to do? 🙂 We always needed one person down to place the water into the bucket and one person up to pull the water up!! 🙂 (warm memories of those days!!:))

Academics went on as usual and we were more immersed in our core branch of Computer Science! There were more subjects like Computer Organization, Compiler Design and we learnt a lot about transistors and resistors and a whole lot of other things! 🙂 We were in our pre-final year and college life was truly exciting.

Hostel days continued with us sitting in each other’s rooms and chatting with friends from all branches. On weekends, we used to have chats till 2 or 3 in the morning!! 🙂 (and no mobiles and no Internet then, so – simple plain gossip!! :))

4th year in college:

We were now in our final year in college. We were the SENIORS and there were junis (juniors :)) and the sub-sub juniors. We could give our generous advice to all our juniors. What subjects were hard, which Prof was good and more of our friendly advice was splashed all around! 🙂 The total number of subjects that we had to study drastically reduced in the final year. We had mastered core Computer Science subjects like Compilers, Operating Systems and also programming languages like ‘C’. We had to do a final project which was a group project.

Final year students got a single room those days. Life was just divine in the final year. We could spend all the time chatting and having fun during our free time and get back to the quietness of our room to get some studying done(yes, we did study! :))

We were almost done with our college life after 4 years and till date, I miss them because it was the most carefree portion of my life. There was no responsibility and all I had to study and run home when I was homesick.

Cheers to my parents for giving me such a wonderful education in a wonderful college and city!

This post is for alphabet ‘M’ of #BlogchatterA2Z by @blogchatter!