The first day of my last month in my motherland...at least my last month here till next summer. Feels so weird, knowing that in less than a month, I will be in a different country, even a different continent. My life will definitely be different, in one way or another. Well, I'll just have to face things as they come...we can't choose the cards we are dealt, just how we play the game.

Yesterday, I went to TARC to spend some time with my students. I really have the worst job in the world - for 13 weeks, I befriend students, grow attached to them almost to the extent of being a bloodkin, start feeling responsible for all their actions and decisions...and then they move on, and I am left to repeat the whole ordeal with another set of students. The only catch - I cannot move on. I miss all my students sorely, and wish I could be with them every step of their life, could guide them through every predicament the same way I taught them programming or algorithms...

I am sad. I am morose. I am <use any word synonymous with depressed>. I don't want to leave. I don't want to stay. I need to get that Ph.D. I just need to do something that will finally make me feel worthy. I want to be a teacher. Not a professor, or a VC, or a Dean. Just...a teacher. Nothing in my life can compare to the feeling of standing in front of a class, talking about my passion, trying to shape the way my students perceive the world. Nothing. Not the official honor accorded to a VC, not the fat paycheck I could get by settling abroad. If I am going to be a salesman, might as well sell something worthwhile, like education. How else will I make sense of my life if someday I find out I have cancer, and hardly 6 months of life left?

I am just rambling. I guess this is a tough place to be in. All my life I have wanted this opportunity, and now it is staring me in the face. I still want to go ahead - I am not chickening out, let's be clear on that. I have just been wondering, I know I am ready to face the primary challenges - low pay, hard work, frustrating problems, lot of stress. I am just not sure about the secondary ones - what if I come back and there is no home left for me? What if I come back and everyone I ever loved has left - have all gone away?

But hey, I will never know the answers. All I can hope is, if I live my life the right away The Universe will take care of it all...

The exam week is almost over, and I am done grading the scripts for both my exams. My routine for next semester also seems more or less confirmed, which means next semester I will get to visit TARC once every week if I want to. This time I really want to, since all my students will be there and I would like to spend some more time with them - my first batch of CSE students - before I have to take my leave.

As I look back I have to admit - teaching CSE110 for the first time was a wonderful experience. Over the last two semesters of teaching CSE101, I realized that I am more of a scientist than just a teacher. I kept trying to get my students interested in matters of scientific importance, something that elicited hardly any response from the business and arts students I taught in summer 07 and fall 07.

This time, however, I had my first batch of proper science students, students who I hoped would be able to identify with my passion for science and engineering. Just this feeling motivated me immensely, and I would go even as far as to say that teaching CSE110 this semester was the best performance of my teaching career so far. I worked hard to design each and every lecture, and more importantly I spent a lot of the class time to not just teach content but to try and capture their interest. Had I only been teaching content, the syllabus could have ended weeks ahead of time. Keeping this in mind, I spent a lot of the classes to solve problems together, and also used at least a few minutes every class to try and motivate them as students. I talked to them about the current world scenario, about the passion of working in science and technology, and about the responsibilities that they need to grow up to as university students.

I don't know how much of it worked. I have met some students who made some decisions already based on my work. I hope I led them down the right path. I also hope that there will be others who will also try to wake up to the immense potential inside them, and stop living the pointless life everyone else would like to see them live. If I can achieve that much, I will have done enough for one semester.

About a week ago, I accepted the offer to attend the M.Sc program in the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. I had received the offer almost two weeks ago, but only decided to send them my final acceptance much later.

Anyway, so right now it is almost sure that I am leaving Bangladesh this August, and finally going somewhere with my cherished dream of getting a Ph.D and finally become the person I have always wanted to be. I wonder how I feel at this critical junction of my life. Yes, that's right, I wonder. I feel I should spend some time asking myself, pondering my deepest feelings and evaluating all the actions that I am about to take over the next few months.

I remember a conversation I had with Rumana last December, on Eid day. She was asking me how much I want the Ph.D, and even why I want a Ph.D. I don't remember all the details of what I told her, but at the end of it she did sound convinced. I wish I could have that conversation once again with someone.

Come to think of it, what is bothering me is not that I feel unsure about this major move. On the contrary, I feel a little too sure about myself. I am about to leave the place I have known as home ever since I was born, and the university where I have spent the last six years of my life, and yet none of it seems to register. Part of this maybe because the actual event is still faraway and in the abstract. I have not made any substantial moves towards departure. Maybe when things get more concrete, the gravity of the situation will finally impress itself upon me.

In a way, I want that. Like I said, this is the biggest change in my life. This means the beginning of the best years of the journey towards my dream. This means that in less than a decade, I might achieve everything I have wanted from life in the last four or five years. It would be rather anti-climactic if this major change in my life came without even a moment of meditation, without even a single question asked about my deepest values. In a way, I look forward to that confrontation to that person within myself, and explain to him what I am doing, and my reasons for doing it. That way I will know I will have that one chance to tell myself what I am doing is right, and there is nothing else I would rather do.

Just one of those days. Was not really feeling well this entire weekend, but still pushed myself to get my work done, which included running a few errands on Saturday. In retrospect, that might not have been a very good move. Today is the first working day of the week, and I am still not feeling my best. However, I just decided about ten minutes ago that I will still be going to the dojo. I may not be able to do the entire class, and will be sure to quit as soon as I feel the first hint of discomfort. But if I totally back off, I feel I will only be doing myself even more harm. Come to think of it, I believe not doing my morning exercise for the last three days also sets a bad precedent. None of my other appointments suffered, and the irony is managing some time to exercise might have been the best thing to do ensure that my immune system can fight back the acute problem. Anyway, what is done cannot be undone. I chose to overlook this one aspect, and today I intend to choose differently, and hopefully to choose more wisely than I had done before. With that in mind, I am hoping to give my best in the dojo today, and then get back on the exercise wagon starting tomorrow morning :)

I think the last time I wrote an entry here was over a year ago. Since then, a lot has changed, some of which you might be able to tell from the changes made in profile. To cut a long story short, after about six months of working part-time at Daily Star, I was called for an interview in my own university. Well, I was actually asked to submit my CV first. Anyway, within a month of all that, I was called for an interview and made the cut for the job. It has been nearly three semesters since then, and I have grown a lot mentally and professionally within this time.
We will not talk about any of those, though. Nor will we talk about the killer phase of preparing graduate school applications. All of that seems trivial from the vantage point of hindsight. In my first semester of teaching, I chose to stay back in TARC with the students. This gave me a lot of time to spend time on my studies, but even more important, this gave me the opportunity to really befriend students and made a huge impact on my life. I believe that this experience taught me what it really means to be a teacher. Then and since then, I have not always been able to do justice to this responsibility, but at least I have tried. In fact, I would go as far as to say that this experience helped me become much better as a teacher. Today, when I look back at the last one year or so, that is the part that jumps out to the eye. I would love to go into details, but I am afraid that a) it will get boring and b) I will spend way too much recounting off-track anecdotes. I guess both of those are effects of being a teacher for a year, and will only get worse with time
This semester is the first time I am teaching senior level courses. One of them even happens to be a course previously taught by Risat sir, one of my most favorite teachers. I was very nervous about taking over a course from him, and still don't feel like I am doing half as well as him. However, what I will have to admit that teaching the course was wonderful opportunity. I got to teach one of my most favorite topics, and learned more about algorithms in this three months that I have in the last three years. And unlike so many other cases, knowing more did not make this field any less interesting to me. In fact now that I know so much more, I have only even more interest in making this my research area when I finally get started with graduate school.
Moving away from work, I have been reading more and more books with every passing month, it seems. Towards the end of last year, I slowed down a lot while working on the applications, but now I seem to have picked up the speed. As a very useful side-effect of reading more, I seem to have become a lot more picky about my reading. Now, when I don't like a book within the first hundred or so pages, I chuck it out. I believe there are two reasons behind this: my taste has developed with all the reading I do, and now when I don't like something, I am confident to say it and not just feel like something is amiss with me for not liking a book I have heard so much about. Another reason could be that I am getting more and more concerned with time management. I have to get done with so much work everyday, that I simply cannot afford to waste time and often this means I have to discard a book that does not immediately capture my interest.
Anyway, enough for now I am guessing. I will wrap it up here. Hopefully sometime in the future I can write about some of the books I have been reading. I can mention some of the big names right away, but I would rather write in details about them at some later time. So for now, ciao!