Montage-Finale (for Inkhaven)

This is the final piece written for Inkhaven in my Montage series. If you are starting here, and would rather read one long-form piece, then go to Memoirs of a Long-time Luddite. If you’d rather read it as a set of serialised posts, then start with Montage-Part 1.

By the third year of undergradIndia has a four-year program for BE/BEng., I had decided I wasn’t going to sign up for the fresh graduate jobs that my friends were all interviewing for on campus. Back then, most Indian universities in engineering didn’t operate purely as centers of education that returns its graduates back to the wild; instead it is also a marketplace, where companies and third-year undergraduate students interact. Companies are allocated slots to come on campus for a couple days to run written exams on one day followed by in-person interviews on the next day—offers are usually made by the end of the day though some might take a couple weeks¹.

The 9-5 grind was never going to work for me in India. I had eavesdropped on Appa’s and other adults’ quibbling about the hierarchical work cultures, where they often got shoved around and how much better America was, in comparison.

I had already been to America a couple times at this point. After my second year of university, I visited my parents, who had moved to Indianapolis; that summer, I’d gotten to spend some time on Appa’s laptop and also taught Amma to use a computer². This was also probably the longest period of time I had spent with a computer in a home. At this point, Gmail and Skype were where I spent most of my time to talk to my friends and girlfriend. But, of course, the computer lost out to the PlayStation 3, which Appa surprised me with when I visited. It had been announced a few days or weeks before I landed in Indianapolis, so most days were spent playing Fifa online.

When I brought that PS3 back to India, I got my first wireless internet connection; this was 2007. I realised how differently the game performed on Indian connections, which just couldn’t keep up with the games’ demands. I suspect this might have been another determining factor, maybe even more important than my dislike for a 9-5 in India, that further biased me towards moving to the US.

As I still didn’t have a computer at home in India, I was still frequenting the cybercafés to get my internet fix³; GMail chat was how my brother and I stayed in touch. He was always on a computer in the IIT Bombay lab. I had no idea what that meant; I thought a lab was where you did physical experiments because that was all my university had under the guise of labs. The computers lived in the computer room.

When I told my brother, in one of our chats, that I wouldn’t be sitting for the placement interviews at university, he was supportive and sold me on the virtues of studying further. He had found a lot of intellectual satisfaction at IIT, where he was finally meeting teachers and students that were of a high caliber—he hadn’t regretted continuing on the education path. Both our undergrad universities were really make-shift by comparison—especially his, which was in the boonies of KarnatakaThe state whose capital is Bangalore.—you got out of these universities exactly what you put into it. The teachers weren’t equipped to really teach you and the general infrastructure was, well, non-existent.

He encouraged me to attempt the IIT entrance exams, like he had done, but also suggested thinking of moving to the US, which he was going to do. He had already decided to head to UC Davis⁴ for a PhD, after interviewing with several other American universities; listening to him helped me learn which American universities were good but also which were well out of my reach. The Harvard that I had once visited was definitely out of reach.

I knew my intellectual ceiling and clearing an IIT entrance exam was beyond that. I had heard that the GRE was not too different from the SAT. And it helped that he seemed a bit more biased towards my studying in the US. He pointed out the benefits of having the whole family in the same country after what would be eight years. He doused my uninformed skepticism, about the costs of university, with rationality; it could be easily paid-off once I got a job there. But the costs could be even lower if I went to Davis, where he was going, or near Denver, where my parents were soon moving to. This all sounded reasonable but I had the suspicion that it would be harder for me to get into a top American university as, unlike my brother, I was coming from a no-name Indian universityNo-name by international standards. and not a premier institute.

So, I sat for the GREs in my final year of undergrad. Unlike when I took my SATs, the GRE tests were computerised so this meant that I now spent even more time at the cybercafés without a fuss from anyone. Around this time, my brother became my adviser on all things US university applications from his lab in IIT; he was probably one of the first instantiations of a remote teacher in India I suspect. I still recall one of our exchanges—I think it was on Gmail—where he was shocked I didn’t know about Google and what it did; this was when he asked me to “Google how to apply to that university”. Through this, I became somewhat versed in the use of a computer when I was nearly 22. I remember realising just how badly I needed to have a computer at home—I even went so far as to get a Linux distribution, called YellowDog, running on the PS3 so I didn’t have to rely on the cybercafés. But the experience without a keyboard was sub-standard; I also learned then that a TV doesn’t work well as a monitor.

I’d initially considered going to Boulder, but decided against it. In 2009, I finally arrived in Davis, where my computational engineering education would really begin; something that never happened at my university in India.

Needless to say, I suffered a lot in my first quarter as I chose coursesHeck, being able to choose felt like such a privilege. We could never do that back home. You are what you were served. that required more programming than I had ever learned. My grades suffered so bad that I spent the next year evading every class with a large component of its grade dedicated to computing. Instead, I chose classes focused on theoretical understanding of topics and hand-written math; in some ways, I was shooting myself in the foot on the coding front but I think, in the long-term career of a researcher, this decision has served me well and made me a more rigorous thinker.

With classes out of the way, I’d eventually learn to code in the grad students’ computer lab. I had the luxury of time to focus on doing so for my PhD research—if I hit a wall, I would research my way out of it; sometimes, I’d even do 50 continuous hours in the lab to make sure I left with a result. 10 Starbucks grande lattes can stave off sleep in a grad student.

In the third year of my PhD, I finally bought a laptop with the little money I had saved up from teachingI was already reliant on Appa for some financial support so didn’t want to burden him with the request for a computer. and spent lesser time in the grad student lab. I spent more time around other programmers with a mechanical engineering bent, who taught me so much more than I would learn sitting in a lab on my own. They got me through a Google Summer of Code, guided me on dual-booting Linux, and gave me my first taste of open-source Python library development. This stuff was so transformative that now I don’t let any undergrad sleep on this kind of exposure—every class of mine encourages computer use. It’s surprising how reluctant people are to pick programming up even now. But I’d hate for anyone to feel as useless as I did in grad school (or at a job where one may not have the time to really learn) just because their undergraduate education didn’t deliver.

Even in the age of LLMs and coding assistants, I think it’s a useful skill to have and so I introduce students to normal coding in the early years and then how these new tools can augment their existing skillset.

This took me a long time to write, and I’m curious whether it resonates with others who came to computing late—or from the other side, whether it’s legible to people who grew up with unfettered access. My email is angadhn at gmail.