MS Life!!!

Back in India, I envied my friends who got into great universities - crap two years enjoying student life again and you have a brand name once you graduate... I didn't take much time to realize what I consider as a fact now - "MS life is no fun!!!".

When tons and tons of assignments, tests, reports, projects and research papers sap life out of you, there is another painful issue that hits you hard more often than not - FUNDING!!! 12 grand is no easy money to pay from your pocket... All those mails to professors, valiant attempts to get their appointments, disappointment when you hear the obvious answer... sometimes makes you retrospect on whether quitting your job for pursuing MS was a right decision. Its really funny how a simple concept of demand vs supply can make your life miserable.

There is tremendous peer pressure to succumb to and I ain't getting good grades either - thanks to those supremely complex assignments and equally talented peers who somehow manage to crack those. You feel humble and grounded. You become selfish and cold. You end up desolate and restless. You sometimes loose your head and eke out your frustration on your friends and loved ones.

The only thing that keeps me going is the intellectual satisfaction of working on high end research with some really big names who are pioneers and even idols in my field of interest. The quality of research here is so wonderful that I, a person so averse to the idea of crapping 5 years (as I called it) for PhD, am now considering pursuing PhD. Its funny how interests keep changing over a period of time. I guess, for people like me, it takes a life time to realize what we exactly want to do in life.

However, the brighter side of life here is that there are innumerable beautiful places to see, different diversities of people to meet and umpteen number of places to freak out. And if you are lucky (like me) you might find yourself among people looking for excuses to do anything but study ;)