Practical wisdom

Yippee!!! Free!!! Free!!!!

No re, not the sale ad. I feel free!! My exams are over..YAY!

Er..well, over for now. Ok,have one next Thursday. But on record,all the exams I was supposed to write are over.
Hmm..er, well, almost.

Have the biggest of all exams, the scariest of them lot, yet to embark upon me. My practicals. I don’t know what sort of a person you are, and if you are the sort who thinks practicals are way too easy than theory, then..alas,great minds here made a slip.

I do not dread practicals. I am not that poor at them,I have managed to get out of the lab without forgetting to hand in the answer paper during my board exams,haven’t I? But its been three whole years since I wrote a university practical exam. I have purposefully forgotten how I can make a complete fool out of myself in front of the examiner. Need to dust out old..eech..painful memories..

I have this knack(is that the spelling) of asking the dumbest of questions possible. Or so I thought. Well, not quite. I learnt that I am not yet the last word on dumbness. Sometime ago, our teachers were giving this demo on practicals. The winding up session you know. Our poor teachers taking a last shot at telling us physics labs can be fun..they are optimistic I tell you.

So,during our demo, which included explaining the basic parts of all the equipments(this at the end of the academic year,mind you) she came across my not so favorite one,the rheostat. (all those from the science stream now will be thinking rheostat is something not even worth talking about at the graduation level, I know. But in my defense, my experiences with such simple apparatus including the screwguage, verniers, resistance boxes etc weren’t exactly fun )

So she was telling this one incident about how a girl ( not biased or anything. Girls can be good at electronics, but i am in a girl’s college) asked an examiner who tried to point out that the third terminal of the rheostat was not connected “ whoa! Slow down..a rheostat has three terminals??” ..and I made a mental note to start preparing a list of such questions I can come up with and get it verified with my teacher, you know, just in case..coz, well, I can’t honestly say I haven’t thought about that on!;)

My war with the torsion pendulum apparatus is famous. There are four pendulums in our lab, and I have repeated the experiment four times. I even know the values byheart. It is believed that all except one pendulum is bewitched. I, being the dumbo that I am, never thought twice why others were fighting over one particular apparatus when there were four others. Had I known such trifle details and practiced voodoo along with others, who knows, I might have not got so many repeats..

(my teachers usually give a repeat remark on records if they find the answer unsuitable. However, I was given a remark “complete the experiment,then repeat.” ;)

Its actually fun when you are not tensed. Experimenting you know. I did that during our project time. We got stuck midway through our project. We even had to consider redoing it, or changing it altogether. But , my project partner, with her determined attitude, went into extremes that no one ever even thought of going(read our pg lab), coming up with amazing solutions. Had this been centuries ago,it would be her sitting under the apple tree, instead of Newton. (added note. There are times at which I wish he had the wisdom to go sit under a coconut , or better, a jackfruit tree.)

That reminds me. I broke a TG (tangent galvanometer) at my lab. Not entirely my fault, I snoozed off. But no one said anything about the replacement. If my teachers are reading this, I am not the person you think I am.

A little bit scared… don’t know what blunders I am going to come up with. Although I do like optics expts. Coz they are done in a dark room..daark room.
If someone is to come check on at us during the exam, we can conviniently stop doing the thing we were not supposed to be doing and pretend we are doing what we are supposed to be doing. Although by doing what we were not supposed to be doing, we were desperately trying to find out what we were actually supposed to be doing.

One big applause to all my teachers for having the patience to endure complete dumbos like me for three years. They know us too well, still their loving hearts hope and pray we do well in the exam.



p.s. quantum dots did come up as a qn. But an essay one. You do know what and how much I knew about quantum dots, didn’t you? Do I still need to answer how my exams went?? Have mercy.

p.s.2. its gonna rain here..havooo!!