As my last post might have mentioned, I had a little meeting today with my GRE prof. Turns out he was making good on the promise he'd made during all his seminars - the first of his students to get a perfect GRE score wins an all expenses paid trip to Goa! Since yours truly managed to get lucky(damn I'm good!), the Goa trip was mine!
By now, anyone who knows me is thinking, "Nadeem in Goa? Have unicorns been spotted walking the streets of New York?"
Let's face it - I'm one of those people for whom Goa doesn't hold any real attraction. My idea of a fun place is probably the Googleplex...anyway, since this was the case, I ended up with a check for Rs. 12000...Whoopee!
OK, cancel that. The truth is, I'm not gonna be using that money for anything fun...It's all gonna go towards registering for the CompSci GRE and the TOEFL, so my poor pals aren't gonna receive a treat(though they've been begging for it like hungry dogs...).
The other interesting thing is the formation of a little study group for the CS GRE...my prof has decided to form a little group of 10-12 students, who'll learn all this stuff together and teach each other. Guess who's in on the fun...For more details, you might want to see http://www.kiceducation.com. And the fact that there's a bad photo of me plastered on the front page has absolutely nothing to do with this...
Other than that, today was rather eventful - I did a couple of interesting coding problems and kicked up my algorithmic skills a notch. Still stuck on one - surprisingly, it's not the algorithm that's giving me trouble, but the implementation...coding up all the fancy abstract actions with which I conceived the solution is a doozy. That's rather odd, since it's a greedy algorithm, and those are usually pretty simple to code...
Still, I'm looking forward to the next TC match on Saturday. All the stuff I've done should stand me in good stead. By then I should have got a lot more practice in, too. Maybe now I'll be able to get out of division 2 permanently...
Back to discrete mathematics - counting was never so much fun!
PS: BOFH has been updated! And all this time I never noticed...shame.
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3 comments:
"GRE prof"? That's twisted. I thought the whole point of GRE is that you can't learn to do well in it (except over a _long_ period). I guess they are wrong.
You're right about the *long* period thing - I certainly couldn't have managed to pull off an 800 in the verbal if I hadn't been pretty strong there to begin with - the math section is pretty easy for most people in this part of the world(or Eastern Europe for that matter...). The GRE class idea is something that might just be unique to India - we have coaching classes for *everything*...I suppose in this case it's because $140 is a rather large amount, so you want to be sure you'll do well and not waste it.
In any case, what I got at this place was material and motivation - I'm a real lazy bum otherwise...That's probably why I started doing TopCoder SRMs - you have a bigger reason to learn algorithms if there's a rating involved and other insane people taking part :-). Our college algorithms course was never that good, and most of my classmates have zero interest in coding and algorithms...yeesh.
Nice blogs, BTW...know any other TopCoders with interesting blogs?
I know only about this blog and yours. I found them by searching Technorati for "topcoder".
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