Luck in Education - Part 1

My education has been one long, lucky ride.

I distinctly remember that day when I sat down at SBOA to take the JEE. The first paper was mathematics. Many questions had a part A) and part B). For these questions, I could immediately see there was a logical connection between parts A) and B) but in almost all the cases never actually worked out what the connections were. In my answers, I merely stated the proofs for part B) as being immediately obvious from part A) with only a skeleton of a detailed sketch. Physics was as expected. Chemistry was my weakest subject, and I distinctly remember the paper being very favourably disposed to the topics I was comfortable with. I got a really high rank, much much higher than I expected. Overall, my "excellent" performance in JEE was as a result of 2 years of hard work, momentary fits of inspiration, and a heavy dose of luck on the D-day.

Next came my years in IIT. Bumbling along in subjects I was barely motivated in, while doing well in subjects I liked a lot (like Graph Theory), I managed to scrape together a decent overall grade. What probably is a great example of the title of this post is that my education continued unimpeded despite the sheer stupidity of my choice of final year project advisor. Hindsight spots foolishness as easily as a casual gardener sees dirt on the petals of white roses. Skirting around a rather unpleasant episode, let me just state the salient point - of how that advisor had, after much cajoling, promised to recommend us for admission to grad schools but didn't send the requisite letters... ever.

I got a chance to work with a technically proficient, hard working advisor in my grad school. That was made possible mainly because of yet more luck in the form of an internship during my undergrad. Replete with the naivete of a young scientist, I suggested in my application for the internship that I work on a specific information coding idea. The idea was straightforward - instead of using one of Huffman coding or LZW coding for compression, why not use both? Being easily excitable on any thought I considered original, I felt confident I would get the internship. It turned out so. My internship advisor liked the spark and called me to immediately start working on the idea. But, within 3 weeks, I found prior work (but of course!). My advisor was gracious enough to still invite me over and work on other problems. Little did I know then that "other problems" meant problems in domains he had no experience in. I was thus left to my whims and fancies in a new world that I knew little about. I read a ton of literature and jotted down a few (trivial, as I would find out later) happenstance ideas. These, framed with a clever analogy from the real world, eventually culminated in what I thought was a respectable paper. That paper got summarily dismissed by one of the big names in the field. But then came along a friend of my internship advisor who "happened" to be on the chair of a journal. No surprises on what happened next - the paper was published in the journal without any of the reviewers even batting an eyelid at its technical merit.

Looking back at that internship paper now, I realize how naive it is and how the writing is so full of hope and excitement befitting a budding, yet surprisingly strong, ego. It could not have stood its ground under any reasonably rigourous mathematical microscope, though, the use of the analogy to the real world was passable (as a candidate for an Ignobel, perhaps?). Anyway, I went on to publish more such papers, all with the good graces of conference chairs a.k.a my co-authors. These publications are likely the only reason why my grad school advisor would have even considered me worth talking to.

The next lucky episode was one that played out towards the middle of my graduate studies in a manner that couldn't have been better orchestrated. Coming up in Part 2.