Fibonacci 'யும் நானும்... (Part 2.0)

It was 23-07-2009. cont...

It is 7.45 AM when i usually leave my place. I was running a bit late that day. Thanks to my TVS Star City, I reached college at exactly 8.30 AM. The session which was scheduled at 10.00 AM started a bit late. The Pre-Placement talk by the HR Manager, Mr.Jiju George was wonderful. The subex video was just awesome. The test started soon after the talk.

The test duration was 1 hour. It consisted of two sections. 1. C Objective Questions(as it was in round 1). 2. C Programming. Each was for half an hour. The Objective Questions were simple, because many were repetitions from the round 1. Thank god i had a glance of 'LET US C' and Programming with C by Byron S Gottfried. This time i really had a glance at many new sides of C. I heard there were negative marks for wrong answers. Of the 20 questions i answered 19. (Who knows... this made the difference... may be). I completed the test. After half an hour the first question paper was taken back and the second one was distributed. Thanks to my ECE friend Aakarshan Saabu. He was one of the volunteers for the test. He was supervising the block in which i wrote the test. He handed me the second question paper. (Who knows... this made the difference... may be :) )

Here comes the reason for the title tag :)

I had 2 programs of which i had to answer any one. I read the questions very slowly. The first one was to sort a set of strings, and to arrange them in the descending order of their repetition. I, for one second, thought of a possible solution. Then came to my mind the usual thinking. 'Try the next question man'. I read the question as my heart was beating fast. It was a program to print the first n Fibonacci numbers. I got my breath back. Thank God i was saved. :)

I once again read both the questions. And tried to visualize them in my mind. As all those who got the question paper that i had, even i chose Fibonacci Series. I was brainy enough to choose it :p ;). hehe. I first wrote the algorithm for the problem. Then i wrote the code in C Language. I added few validations for the input like an error will be displayed if we enter a 0 or -ve numbers. I thought for all possible cases for the program and coded the same. I did not use a recursive call method, neither did i use arrays. I had written a straight forward looping structure for the Fibonacci program. By the time i finished this, many had finished their progs too. I then wrote the test cases (this made my paper a little different from others). I finished my work, checked it all once and then i returned my paper and came out.

We always discuss little after the exams. My friends Deepak and Karthikeyan had got a different program set. Their first program was same as mine. But their second program was to do a 'word wrap' as in notepad in an efficient manner. I thought for a second. It was no equal to Fibonacci. The question papers were not of the same grade. I did not know how they will evaluate this paper. So we were not sure of who will be selected and who will not be. Then we had a talk with our IT mates. 2 of them had got Fibonacci and 3 others had got the other paper. They are 5 in IT as we are 3 in CSE (vetti fellows :) hehe). Johnson too had got Fibonacci.
These things happened so in the way we all sat in the hall. The 2 question papers were shuffled like 1,2,1,2 etc. I mean alternative.

I felt a bit bad. I could have coded it in recursive method. It would have been more small than that i wrote. But worries, i forget them soon. :). As always this thought faded from me in a few hours.

The next day, I got a statistical report from Deepak as who all had got Fibonacci. He was a warehouse, i mean. His brain, My god. Should calculate his capacity in GB one day. ;)

The results were to come out by the last week of july and the next coming rounds were scheduled for august first week. But it got delayed a little. We did not get the result in the next week. We used to go once in a while to the placement cell and enquire on the result.

The delay was not so long. We got the result in the first week of august. I did not expect any result. Neither positive nor negative. It came positive :). I got short listed for the next round for 'subex'. I was feeling happy.

9 had cleared the round from the crowd. It was a really huge crowd. Like from our college we had 82, several other colleges too had almost an equal number of students coming in to our college for the round 2 on 23/07. Nearly a thousand people attended the written test. 9 from KCT(my college) had cleared. I did not know the exact count of students from the other colleges like GCT, CIT, SKCET, Mahalingam, Park etc... Heard an abstract on all.

9 from 82 and me in the 9 was a joyful moment for me. Johnson, Gayatri, Brindha from my class, Gopal, Gokul from IT, one guy(i dont know his name) and Priya from MCA, and Arun Nagappan from EEE had cleared the round with me. We congratulated one another on this feat. Of 82 half the people or more should have got Fibonacci. But why this 9 was always a question in my mind. Gayathri, was the odd one out. She had attended the 'string sort' program for which she had the choice of 'word wrap'. She was the only one in the 9 without Fibonacci.

Did the Objective question make the difference? None knew a solid answer.

One quote which i recalled then was,

Life is a puzzle/riddle...
Dont try to solve it...
Just enjoy it...

Sridar sithapa had once told me this. He reads a lot than me ;) and I always admire the quotes he shares with me.
Still i had four face to face rounds. What awaited me next was a real puzzle.

With this i would like to end this post of mine... 3.0 is sure to hit the web soon... Since i have my study holidays coming next. :) Fun time in the whole semester :).

I have always admired writer sujatha rangarajan. though i have read only few of his works. The way he finishes his 'கற்றதும் பெற்றதும் '... An Awesome man... he definitely is !...

இன்னும்...

A K S