Ooops.... I did it !!!

Many a times in my life, whenever I had an opportunity to test my abilities, I always used to shirk them. I am still not sure if it was because of the fear of failure or my laziness that should be blamed, but I always comforted my ego with the fact that if only I wasn’t lazy. What if I lacked abilities and was covering up with my laziness ?? Well could be true but that thought was ostracized as it hurt my ego a lot.

Anyways...coming to the point, I never used to bother about any events that call for paper-presentations, bplans, quizzes etc. I always used to discard such concepts as being purely academic and hence were hardly of any interest to me. This was primarily due to lack of highly-motivated company around me. And most of the times the motivation had to be too high to make up for my laziness. So this semester started off as usual with the boring classes most of which I missed as I was busy slumbering in my cozy room. But a week back, there was this ' National Level Paper Presentation contest' based on the summer internship done by students from bshools all over India during the summer. The topic despite being very relevant to my summer internship project couldn’t evoke any enthu in me to give it a shot. But just two days before the last date of submission, one of my juniors who was a part of the organizing team insisted on me submitting an entry as there was no representation from my bschool. Well that did make me feel bad and after a lot of internal conflict with my innate laziness, I decided to give it a shot and convinced Pravin (my alter-ego in terms of laziness) to help me out with this.

To start off with, things seemed pretty easy coz, I already had my summer internship report and had to just reformat to send it in the required format. But that was just the start..We had to reanalyze my project all over in terms of the variables and parameters as instructed by the contest. After an entire nightout, we somehow managed to send it in time. That really took quite an effort from us and in line with our expectations, our entry got shortlisted and had about a week's time to give the final presentation in front of the jury.

This was the hardest part, we had to miss sleep for almost 3 consecutive nights to gather more information to backup our case and spent another three days in perusing documents and making the presentation. We were done with our presentation just 2 hrs before the contest and hardly had any time to rehearse our presentation. Then, hoping against hope we reached the venue.

There were three other teams besides us and each of us had 15 min to present followed by Q&A session. We were the second team to present and screwed up a bit on our timing and presentation and were quite disappointed with our effort in presenting. Soon all the teams were done with their presentations and there was a brief break before the results were out. We were pretty sure that all we would be able to gain out of all this would be a sumptuous lunch that was soon to follow after valedictory address.

Though we put up 'its-all-over' looks on our faces, somewhere in my heart I was hoping something to happen, some miracle. And voila...as if someone had read my thoughts...our entry was awarded the second prize. It was an amazing feeling to walk-up to the dais to receive the prize. One irony about this was that the person who awarded me the prize was my prof who had given me 'C' in his course in the previous semester. All the incidents where he chided me for my low attendance (read 30%) suddenly ran before my eyes. Anyway receiving it from him made me feel even better.

So that's it... seems like I finally broke the jinx and there stands an attractive addition to my CV which hardly had anything worth mentioning in 'Academic Achievements' section. Hope to rev it up even more in the coming days.

So this was what had kept me occupied for the past one week.

That’s all for now. Signing off to celebrate with 'Seagrams - Fuel'.

Cheers !!!

Online links for the same ..
http://www.coolavenues.com/bschools/060828/iitd_gift_1.php