Summer Internship with KAIST, South Korea — Murtuza from IIT Guwahati
Wildcard entry for: – 26th August 2012
Name of the intern: – Murtuza
Institute: – IIT Guwahati
Organization interned with: – Smart Environmen
As my internship was approaching an end I didn’t know what to feel. I was simply overwhelmed with the plethora of emotions which were running parallelly in my head. On my arrival I had a bag full of clothes, zero expectations and an ecstasy of having an internship in a foreign land. When it was time to leave, the luggage felt heavier and lighter at the same time. Heavier because of the experience and lighter as I had cleared my head off certain questions and confusions which have seemed to lurk around me since time immemorial.
Like any other Indian, going to a foreign land marks the beginning of an endless comparison between the foreign land and your own country. Keeping that aside I reached Incheon International Airport claimed by some to be the world’s best and in the first four hours itself I was thrown into adventure. It so happened that on reaching the campus bus stop from the airport I forgot my luggage in the bus. I happened to have spoken to some Koreans on the way and given that moment of craziness when the bus left, a Korean lady actually ran behind the bus and yelled in Korean to stop the bus whilst I was frozen in fear and anxiety. She ran almost 300-400 meters when the next signal turned red stopping the bus. I couldn’t believe what happened in those brief 90 seconds! She even dropped me directly to the campus. I was falling in love with Korea. It was inevitable.
I reached the campus and was awe struck with the technology being utilized in everyday life. With old ladies driving public buses and smart card identification all around the campus I felt I was in a modern science fiction movie. It gave birth to a desire of bringing such technology in my own country. I am sure it will happen one day. My professor was an impressive man. Knowledgeable, creative and at the same time fun too. Since the lab was interdisciplinary I had the most creative group of Ph.Ds there could ever be. They were five (felt like Pandavas to me) each having their own unique ability with two from Mechanical, two from Architecture and one from Computer Science. It was nothing less than an honour to work with such high profile students from the science community. The best part was the treatment I received from them. Despite the fact that I was just a sophomore undergraduate student with obviously their knowledge base being far stronger than mine, they treated me like God. That’s the time I really felt the power of being an IITian. It so happens that 3 Idiots is really famous in South Korea and they highly respect the IITs .
Regarding my internship work, I feel rebooted, renewed and rejuvenated with the kind of knowledge and facts I learnt about engineering, design and architecture. I was working on a Smart House that could recognize its residents, realize the environment conditions like temperature, humidity etc. The house was loaded with all the possible cutting edge technology that you could think of. Gesture recognition, speech recognition and the ability to compose and decompose itself (just like the movie Transformers) were some of the features of the house. Beginning from the foundation to the roof I never knew there were so many aspects involved in the construction of a house which otherwise as a lay man would be thought of as an empty box! Working every day for 11-12 hours made me walk down the memory lane of JEE preparation where you knew why you were working that hard and for what. At the end of the day I used to be physically tired but mentally still had the urge of completing the goal by spending 5 more minutes. It’s funny how life had a taken a complete circle where I was back into the JEE environment but well, I guess it spirals upward rather than a circle (the 3-D graphs have improved my creativity ;) ). The conclusion of the work involved making an animation of the whole house representing all the features which we soon decide to release. Also, we plan to submit an IEEE magazine article once the reviewing of my report is done.
Having healthy relations with your professor is like a dream come true. It not only gives a good impression about oneself but also about your own country and college. It is definitely a big responsibility and I felt proud to have lived up to my country’s expectations. I got my PhDs so interested that they all want to visit India at least once. One of the PhDs had actually worked in TATA motors in Bangalore and knew terms like “chai” and he asked me whether I miss that in Korea. Obviously if you are a tea lover you can understand the pain of not having tea for nearly three months. Being in close proximity to the Korean culture I realized it was in deep contrast to our Indian culture. The stuff they eat might faint almost ninety nine percent of our country, but that’s the beauty of a foreign culture, isn’t it? You get to understand modernity and a broad-minded society and hope to bring that back in your own land.
As I am writing this I realize there were just infinite small moments with a huge impact on me. The Korean weekends, the beaches, the cars, the GPS system, the cycling culture, Miss Jins Hamburgers – the lady who decided to be like a mother to me always giving those extra French fries as I became a regular customer in that expensive land, the metro lines of Seoul, the wax museum, the ice skating…I just cannot confine everything in the wall of words. All in all just like JEE preparation and its success gave me the confidence to crack any hurdle in life, similarly my internship in a foreign country gave me the confidence of being adaptable and being able to keep my country proud wherever I go.
Was this interesting? If yes, please like the post on Facebook (below) and help Murtuza become winner of the week and win the prize (Rs. 1,000/-) that he truly deserves!
