Thursdays are fun @ Purdue

We had a session on Purdue libraries and it was interesting to know how the concept of libraries with millions of books have turned into a bunch of databases. Being a student is often a luxury. For instance, we have access to reports that are worth some millions of Dollars. Information has so much value in the real world! I was kind of struggling to find the latest IRS (Indian readership survey) back in India. All I could get was some bits and pieces. Now its just a click of a button away! This session also had a 20 minutes session on the Capital IQ database, which, as Krannert students we have access to. And that too for free. Some of the finance freaks where like “wow!” I was like “Hey, I know someone who works there!”. Honestly, Data monitor, Capital IQ were mere “just another IT firms”, back in India. Now I’m kind of a user here. Some other fascinating things here are Online classrooms, submission of home work by uploading into a sharepoint server, and then reviewing, grading and almost everything is online here.

Classrooms are so much fun here, not just in Purdue, in all of US I believe. You can eat in the classroom, I’m Kind of carrying a cup of coffee for every class. We get free Starbucks coffee every morning! That caffeine keeps me awake in class. People do eat their lunch and breakfast during class. I’m kind of imagining those days when we had to hide a box under the table, if we had to eat in the classroom! Another cool or rather not so cool thing is that we call our professors by Name. Not so cool because I’m still struggling to do so. These guys here are like “hey John.. what was that you said just now?”.

Coming back to Thursdays, we kind of have a schedule where classes are only from Monday to Thursdays. Fridays are usually for leadership speaker series when we have guest speakers in our campus. We have pretty interesting speakers in the 1st module such as Steven Levitt, author of freakanomics, some FBI Agents who cracked down the Enron case etc. Yeah, So by Thursdays all assignment submissions and class work is over and from Friday afternoon we begin preparing for the next week. That’s the system here. Thursday nights are meant for chilling out like I mentioned about Cactus nights last time. Today, I went out to Lafayette Brewing Co., a popular pub where we get locally brewed Beers (Of course, this was a school sponsored event!). And I tell ya, these beers are nothing before Kingfisher! But I like hanging out with these American guys. I like their sense of Humor!