A Magical Class

Finally, something happy to write, after all the droning I've been doing for the past few posts...

So... most of my days are spent wondering what the #$%@ am I doing here. The classes are dull, there are way too many papers to read, and there is actually not enough time to digest all the material that we read. I think it would be better if there were fewer papers, but they were discussing in depth. However, such is grad school...

Anyway, so after a couple of weeks of classes where nothing special happened, and I was very unmotivated, something really interesting happened today. In the CS219 class, someone thought that the professor was out of town, attending a conference, so he spread the news that the class was going to be conducted by a TA. Result: half the class was absent. However, this was a very nice thing to happen.

As usual, the class started with a student volunteer presenting a paper. The professor seems to be in a really good mood, and was asking him a lot of questions about the paper. The student was trying his best to answer. The discussion was quite animated, and even some of the students, including me, chipped in discussing various extensions and applications of the paper, the drawbacks, advantages, etc. sometimes questioning the student, and sometimes helping him...

Then, we had a quick break, which I and a fellow student spent discussing some more with the professor, which was cool!

Finally, the professor presented a couple of new concepts and discussed another paper. Surprisingly, he was asking some simple fundamental questions to random students in the class. A couple of times he asked me too. Thankfully, I could answer them successfully. At some points of time, I even got the feeling that I was actually conversing with him in front of all the students. This feeling was exhilarating, and I felt like I connected with the professor on a completely new level! Something this profound normally doesn't happen, and I was delighted that it happened with me...

The class was perfect simply perfect, there were a lot of discussions, a lot of ideas thrown around. It was fulfilling.... and it is such classes that get me through the quarter, making my life feel worth something.

I yearn for many more magical classes like this.