Online Sub-MISSIONS

Online Sub-MISSIONS

After it was decided to cancel the exams of most Under-Graduate programs, it became mandatory to submit all the experiment journals and assignments for all the subjects. It was because the scores were to be counted based on your midterms/end terms and the last Semester's score. Before the decision was made, the students were either enjoying their time at home or studying for the exams. In the first 13-14 days, everyone was relaxed and happy with the decision made by the university. As the professors asked for the work before the deadline, most of the students (including me) were shocked. Students wished that somehow the submission were should be canceled too. But life isn't all good and no hardships, is it?😑

6 subjects with some of them including projects!

We initially had to submit projects for 4 of them and write a report for it. Even if you use the internet to get some project and modify it, you'll take the time to make the complete report. Thankfully, we could choose two more partners for it. So when it came to the projects, it was a divided effort among the 3. In our group, Mr. Tenacious was doing most of the work, and Dr. Workaholic in contrast to his personality; wasn't willing to work. Maybe he was bored because of the lockdown, can't blame him though.

But, at times, I was pissed on him.

For all the subjects, we had around 10-12 experiments that we couldn't perform at the labs because the colleges were closed after 13th March. As the university had already declared that term work is necessary for the evaluation of marks, we had no other option.

One way or another, it had to be done before the deadline. Students quickly started figuring out ways to complete the work in the least amount of time. The Studious ones started completing the assignments as soon as they got notified about the deadlines. Some of them had completed them already. But as I've said earlier, most people had treated the quarantine period as their Summer Vacation.

The students were all relaxed, the stress level in those days was negligible. Movies, Music, Social media, and 100 other things of that nature consumed our day.

It's obvious that most people had their work pending, so it was mine.

The deadlines were declared 2-3 days prior. That caused an absolute panic amongst all the students. All the students got busy completing their work and it was natural that the stress level was tremendously high during those days. It was the first time I experienced how it felt to write things while sleeping. I copied every word without giving a second thought. I could have skipped some parts to make the answer short and sweet, but I didn't. I didn't even want my brain to take the pain to think about the things needed to be written. I wrote a few assignments on my own so that I can help my other friends by letting them copy those. It is a kind of adaptable system that students follow to reduce workload in such stressful situations.

Students had to reduce their phone usage and sleep hours for those days at least. The subjects got prioritized according to the submission date and slowly the work started getting complete. We had to scan the copies serially and convert those images in a PDF format. It was quite painful because I remember scanning uncountable pages and uploading it to the google drive for further ease. The PDF made by scanning pages took up more space and we had to compress our files as well.

We were supposed to submit these documents on the Google form provided by our professors. The google form was short with various entry fields and a link where we could upload those documents. The professors had told us that the links would expire if we fail to submit those documents before time. I remember completing a submission for a subject 15 minutes right before the time. Later on, I found that the link wasn't expired because most of the class hadn't submitted the files.

It sucks when you think the water is chest high when it isn't. It gives a feeling that you went too hard on yourself. Anyway, the professors had to wait for everyone to submit their work.

The monsoon season had just arrived then. It was not raining in Mumbai, but towns and villages experienced a downpour. That resulted in inferior network connections in remote places. My friend took 5 minutes to load a simple Google form on his browser. The slow internet connection consumed his 15-20 minutes even after he had to walk out of his house to get the network range. Fortunately, he got some signal strength and he was able to fill the form successfully.

Some teachers preferred emails over the form submissions and that was pretty much fine. Some teachers had already accepted some of the documents through WhatsApp. But because they wanted to keep a systematic record of the submissions, they asked us to send everything again via the Google forms.

Talking of projects, the branches where the projects needed to make something involving electrical or mechanical components weren't needed to submit them. The branches related to computers had to submit their projects with the other documents as their projects mainly involve virtual kinds of stuff like an application or a program. (For the Second Year at least)

At last, the submissions for my college was done. Mission accomplished!
There are always a few students who submit their work 10 days after the deadline. And yes, the professors always keep on reminding these students of their work. I'm sure this happens everywhere. The college professors must be busy evaluating the marks and sending those to the university. So let's wait for a surprise!

(I thank Siddhesh Kumbhar for suggesting this topic. It's only because of readers and thinkers like you the blog never runs out of interesting topics!😀😀😀

I would also like to wish my great friend Tanmay a HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂)