Contemplating Time-off

These past few days have seen the politics of worst kind in Pakistan. From allegations of harassing massages to the claims of hidden marriage, Pakistan has had enough. Everybody that I talked to seemed exhausted with the news and wanted to get a break. But with the modern media and the social networks breaking news 24/7, getting a break from the current affairs feels like an impossible dream. But to be practical this is the right time and best chance to get a break and let your politics related brain cells rest and re-energize before the election 2018 strikes us again.

Sitting at home on a working day, trying to divert my attention away from the stomach pain, the ship of my thoughts sailed through the memory voyage once again. It’s been almost two years since I started my professional career as a software engineer. I cant believe how quickly the time has passed, I remember Back in the university days dreaming of having a job seemed like everything. Especially in final semester, job was all that we would discuss. Right after the senior batch passed out, we would often sit around together and try to recall the names of our seniors who graduated just shy of a 2 GPA. We used to be really happy if one of those guys got a job right out of university. Actually the happiness was not truly for them but for us, because if one of those guys could get a job, then chances were that the gods of jobs would show mercy on us as well.

I wasn’t sort of the guy who would study consistently through out the semester, neither were most of my friends. In fact I was quite far away from that, I remember in one of the start semesters me and my friend had this competition of  leaving quizzes (the one who misses more quizzes wins), it wasn’t a declared sort of competition but rather an unintentional one, somehow the number of left-quizzes kept increasing for both of us naturally. Sometimes we kept sleeping through the quiz times, sometimes we didn’t bother going to the Braber’s hall (That is where the quizzes and exams used to take place) because we could foresee the outcome of the quiz already. I don’t really remember who won the competition, but we both sure did end up with the probation letter in our hands.

I used to be really care free. I didn’t know the significance of a good GPA. Since I had already made up my mind that I would do a job after graduation, and as I had heard multiple people say that GPA doesn’t matter in our industry, I didn’t bother much about the grades. Rather it would be right to say that I made it a motto of my life to not get a good GPA. I remember during one summer, I picked up a course to improve, and got so lost in watching the season “LOST” that I actually lost the bet of exam and ended up with the same grade as before after the summers. I remember I slept in the mid term exam and as soon as the invigilator woke me up with a weird look, I handed him the paper and left. I was totally John Snow in that exam (The guys who don’t understand the game of throne’s reference, John snow’s girl friend kept telling him that he knew nothing).

That attitude wasn’t lasting however, I changed in my senior year. I wanted to make a good impression before passing out. I also realized that although a normal GPA doesn’t effect your job hunt, but the bad GPA sure does. So I worked and prayed to get a good GPA. I got really good marks in the 7th semester mid-term exams. My friends started to tease me that I am ending up on the deans honors list this time. Although they did that in a humorous way, I however decided to turn this into the reality and got serous about the quizzes and assignments. And when the final result came out, I had actually gotten on to the dean’s honor list. My friends were shocked. And I sure teased them back.

The funny thing however is that the dean had forgotten about the party that he had to throw for the toppers. So I went to him and discussed it with him. we finalized a date for the party. But then when the day came I slept through it and missed it.

However I have always been good about the practical stuff, even during the first semesters when I was clumsy about the studies, I enjoyed doing the programming exercises, and focused on the projects seriously. That is the reason that the responsibility of the coding part of the final year project was entirely put on my head by my group mates. They helped equally in the presentations and documentation part though.

It has only been two years and the university days seem far behind. My target at the time of graduating was to get my hands dirty with coding for two years and then plan for the future. Seems like the time has come and I need to re-evaluate my future plans.