electronic realisation

There are days when you realize that all you study in college is not trash. Today was one of those days for me. Regional Electronics Lab, ONGC, Baroda, has acquired two new multivibrators from a Russian firm ‘Geosvip’. I won’t get much into the technical details but all that this instrument does is to send signals down in the earth and record reflections coming from it and detect oil. It produces an artificial earthquake.
I had committed myself to a non-electronics vacations but my dad insisted me to come and learn something. Very reluctantly I went to the testing site and saw two adjacent white trucks carrying a hell lot of equipment and making ear-splitting noise. Far from them was a blue truck which was the control unit supervising the white trucks.
The one hour insight into the functioning of a multivibrator was far more enriching than any electronics lab I had ever been in the college. And the fact that I could relate somewhat to the college syllabus made me realize that it wasn’t waste after all.
From the shirtless Russian engineers flaunting their muscles and tattoos to feeling the earth shake through the multivibrator brought me to stark reality that becoming a good electronics engineer is a rather uphill task. The amount of hard work they were putting in made me wonder if this was why our electronics department put us under so much pressure to study. One would really have to ask the HOD that but if it is true then there surely are better and productive ways.
Perhaps industrial trips, at least one in each semester is a good way. It would help students clear their notions about why electronics is so tough and why one has to go that extra mile. Electronic applications are not a cakewalk. They are fast changing and evolving and one has to be on their toes to keep pace. At the same time we must understand that the task at hand is interesting and not insurmountable. It may be a lot of hard work but at the end of the accomplishment can bring a lot of satisfaction as I have seen it in the case of my dad.