First post during my PhD life

I am taking three courses here and I also have to start some project work after discussing with my advisor today what projects are available in the first place. I am doing Biochemistry, Intermediate Statistics and Image registration in Bio-Imaging - the three courses. I didn't think I would do chemistry ever in my life again, but this biochemistry is different: it is clearing some of my unanswered doubts in chemistry and biology - exactly because of which questions that were left unanswered, I used to hate chemistry during my JEE days.

Statistics is the extension of what we did in PRP, but it's getting much more complex with multivariate analysis. The only problem (maybe not a problem, but a plus point in the long run) is that we have three assignments every week...one every week per course...and no copying - the TAs are competent enough to detect fraud, unlike back on our campus. I am very disappointed by the plummeting quality of JEE, GATE and other entrances to IITs by the year. They are the first step in maintaining the quality of education at IITs.

In addition to this, I will have to start research in day or two. As we come to the topic of cooking, it's completely different for me here. We are buying vegetables off the store called Giant Eagle and are cooking every dinner - Naresh and me. Naresh is helping me a lot with everything. It's good that he is a little miser than me: when I answer his question - "Why do you need to buy that thing?" it helps me answer myself and gain control of my own spending. There is also an Indian store called Kohli's where you can basically get all the spices for Indian cuisine and all edible items available in India that you can't typically buy in the US.

Life is not yet boring here - I am taking Ballroom dance classes this semester - (I think you know what ballroom dance is...), so I have something to look forward to when the week gets boring. And some weekends we go out to some place to visit in Pittsburgh - we visited the Ventakeswara Temple here - the largest in the US, on our first weekend. We went to a museum (Carnegie Science Center), but it was basically like a children's museum - all physics principles we studied at school demonstrated by working models. Then we went on top of a hill in the heart of the city (called Mt. Washington, and people live there, it's not just a hill) in the center of the city (main areas/centers of the city are called Downtown areas anywhere in the US, like Mount Road in Chennai, Koti in Hyderabad, etc), and it was very good to see the whole city from such a high point above the city. These are the three places we visited. I am planning to buy a camera sometime later after I get my first stipend at the end of this month and write a kind of online blog article explaining my experiences in my first month in the US for people who want to know abt my welfare - and they can read it...

Get more enthusiastic - mingle with more people and ask questions to everybody you meet - life will get more interesting. I am trying to change myself after I got out of the campus - talk to more people, try not to be feared by things that look insurmountable at first but are just pebbles later on, get active in whatever you do, utlilize all the resources here - by the way, all games and sports are free here - they give you all the equipment when u show your id card - we played baddy twice, frisbee once, some indoor games like pool, foosball, TT sometimes. I am trying hard to balance my curricular and extracurricular life, and have to get used to resisting temptation, I don't want to repeat the same mistakes I made on the campus at IITM - tempted by the comp and waste time on movies. It's good that there are no DC++s or somethings like that here. We can watch movies online but have to put fight and search for the movie we want. I haven't tried that yet, and I have no reason to try anytime soon.

I request you all to keep me updated with happenings in India and for that matter anywhere in the world- it could be anything - what's happening in AP, India, your family if you want to let me know, your office, political situation that's not reflected in the newspapers, rumours, gossips, philosophical articles - virtually anything you think would be of some or even no value to me. Email is the only means of visual and more effective communication. We can't trasmit all the information we want over just voice on the phone!

This is the first time I am writing such a long post after I got here.

PS: This post is copied in most part, from an email I sent to my friend, since I didn't want to write it in a new way and spend a lot of time on it.