Me, doctor??

Today was one of those days when I accompanied my husband to the university and pretended to do work while actually reading cinesouth.com, galatta.com and indiaglitz.com (my favourite website for viewing photos of tamil cine events without subscribing). I just began happily drifting away into cyberspace when all of a sudden, a pile of work landed on me by email. Apparently the format of my output was wrong, so I had to reformat stuff, parse this huge ugly file, subconsciously aware that a single parse error could change these huge gigabytes of data into garbage :( That is the bane of programming, it is scary to think how much research is built on code that may contain some tiny treacherous bug somewhere waiting to challenge your results!! :( OK.. on to some serious stuff......

A couple of days ago, during one of my routine wanderings in the parallel universe, my husband called out "hey.. I forgot that you were an engineering undergrad, help me with something, what transform do you use to represent a 2D waveform, what do you know about up sampling and down sampling?" Sampling? I only know samplers, transforms.. transforms.. that rang a bell somewhere.. Fourier, Laplace.. Z transform.. I had heard those terms somewhere.. what the f$#% did I do with them? I had no clue, this yet again brought me to a sad realization that I had wasted 4 crucial years of my life "studying" something I couldn't care less about. I was one of those students who just followed the herd. I gave up admission at a prestigious architectural school and my dream of performing surgery to enroll into an ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING program. Why? Because, only idiots study science right? Only losers spend their life researching worms and flies, and here I am today researching tinier life forms. Where does this kind of prejudice stem from? Why do people from India look down upon those who are not engineers or doctors or lawyers? A PhD in english is sadly not equivalent to a PhD in computer science. I resolve that my children would never have to choose between satisfaction and money. Just as I was voicing my opinion, my friend Ray quickly pointed out.. "hey, but didn't you mention the other day that your kids would be doctors?" Silence. "Well, all I said was [clearing throat] when they are young, I would teach them biology and make them love the subject so much that they would eventually end up choosing medicine " :)

Oh.. do we ever change?