Hyphenated-Homestead

So, I’ve noticed my stories have the temporal agility of a ninja on a trampoline. Chronological order is so last season; I’m all about that time-hop life. From the ’90s to the roaring twenties, my narrative is a rollercoaster with a mind of its own. My last post was about Y2K (Dec 31, 1999) and now I am going to bring you back to September of 1999. Not a lot of time hop this time but be ready…some other stories might test your ability to flex time!

If my literary acrobatics leave you feeling like you’ve entered a parallel universe, fear not! I’m open to listening to your feedback or contact me here.

The graduate class was an unusually large cohort that year, boasting around 25 or so students, and to our surprise, a whopping 60+% of us were Indians, all with a shared engineering background. It was as if a slice of India’s engineering prowess had decided to converge in the heart of Clemson. Ecstatic to embark on our academic adventure, the thrill of conquering GRE and TOEFL exams, securing student visas, and earning our spot in an esteemed American University created an infectious sense of accomplishment.

The joyous celebration of our hard-earned achievements made the commencement of the first semester at Clemson special, and our heads were still spinning from the whirlwind of excitement.

But we didn’t know beneath the surface of our jubilation, a quirky academic odyssey awaited us, making the journey even more memorable than we could have imagined.

Professor Kelloy (name changed for privacy) was our professor for a pre-req class around fundamentals of Probability and Statistics that most of us had to take in our first semester. Maybe we needed to start with the basics to increase our ‘chances’ to be successful at the end of the arduous master’s program? Jokes apart, but our statistics guru’jee’ decided to drop a bomb on us in the form of a mid-term exam just two weeks into the semester. We started the semester in mid-August, and the exam was announced for the day after Labor Day.

None of us were accustomed to mid-terms. Heck, what are they? Why are they important? We didn’t know.

Coming from the land of late-night study sessions and last-minute cramming, none of us took this seriously. The resonance of “Jugaad” techniques seemed to follow us into the realm of probability and statistics, as if our collective engineering spirits were ready to tackle any problem thrown our way.

Also, why worry when there’s a $1 Bollywood movie night featuring “Taal” just a day before the exam? Bollywood movies don’t feature in American theaters regularly, that too in a small university town like Clemson, so make it count, we were told by the Indian grocer who conveniently was the sponsor of the movie.

So, there we were, enjoying the movie with Aishwarya Rai‘s graceful dance moves to AR Rahman’s soul-stirring melodies, happily munching on free popcorn, oblivious to the statistical storm brewing on the horizon! Little did we know that the graceful and difficult dance we enjoyed with “Taal” (which is the true meaning of the word, btw) would be a mere warm-up for the intricate and challenging moves the exam would make us perform the following day—only this time, it involved numbers instead of dance steps!

The next day, as we sat staring at the probability and statistics questions, we realized we were in deep water. Turns out, statistics doesn’t have the same rhythm as a Bollywood dance number. Panic set in, and we collectively faced the reality of our unpreparedness. But hey, misery loves company, right? At least we were all struggling together, finding solace in our shared downfall.

The results day loomed over us like a dark cloud, and Professor Kelloy was set to distribute the graded papers the next day. We had no clue that our statistical misadventure was about to take a serious turn.

Time to come down to earth (from la-la land that we were in) and focus on why we were here at first place. Our post-graduate studies!

As they say, no education comes for free!

Any guesses on what happened next? Read further for the aftermath of our statistical rollercoaster, where the points on our exam papers held the key to our academic fate!