A rant about Engineering Physics - 1 (the mild version)

I was genuinely interested in Physics or at least what I thought was physics before joining Engineering Physics at IIT Madras. That was the reason why despite having an AIR of 846 (with which I could have gotten better, sorry let me rephrase, more sought after branches) I decided to take Engineering Physics, B.Tech. Was this a mistake?

There were a lot of raised eyebrows at home when I decided to take EP, but what was more surprising was that there were more raised eyebrows at IIT Madras than at home. I thought that students at IIT are so passionate about what they do that they don't care which branch they are in and all that matters to them is their interest (When I told Mithun this a few days ago he laughed and said, "Dude, no matter where you go we are still human."). I was wrong. In the first few days I realized or rather was told that EP isn't exactly about Physics (the 11th, 12th JEE one, the interesting type) but more about Math (Quantum Mechanics only sounds interesting and intuitive when you don't get too deeply into it). The only way out of this, I was told, was to put a Branch Change or even a branch slide and somehow get out it. I thought, "These are the people who run away from their interests because the path is tough, noobs." So now after Three years of EP do I still feel the same?

No, I don't I wouldn't be writing this otherwise. In the second year I started to realize that Physics (as was taught here) wasn't what I wanted. It seemed more Math to me than the intuitive subject I used to like. Well of course it was foolish of me to expect it to remain as it was in 11th and 12th. At first I thought it was because I wasn't putting enough fight, then I realized that I didn't have enough enthusiasm and zeal for the subject to put fight. So I started looking for other things which I might like.

It’s a well known fact that EP students do a lot of courses in the Electrical Engineering Department. The Digital Signal Processing courses seemed interesting and those seemed to me the only sensible courses I was doing at that time, the rest being Physics courses which I didn't have a feel for. At the end of the second year I decided to do an intern related to DSP and see if I truly like it. It ended up being an intern with a bit of Image processing and a lot of Math thrown in. I ended up publishing a paper at the end of it though, and I had the Mathematical Physics course I did to thank for it (to a certain extent). So I decided to give Physics another try.

So in my 5th semester I did a few Physics courses, and in 6th semester took Quantum Mechanics 2 as a department elective when I could have taken some course in Electrical Engineering. I am glad I did that course because after that I was sure that that was not something I wanted to do. So I haven't taken a single Physics course after that and won't take one in the next semester, which will be my last.

Well, in the semester I was struggling with Quantum Mechanics 2 I was also doing a course on Advanced DSP and System Identification. Turned out I was decently good at them and that I liked them. So the following summer I chose an Internship with a DSP company (ITTIAM) over an Internship in BARC (Bhabha Atomic Research Centre). I enjoyed the intern quite a bit, and this added with the fact that the company gave me a PPO (Pre-Placement Offer) made me like DSP a lot. So much that I am thinking of 'apping' in it.

So here’s the confusion. Do I like DSP just because I was better at it than I was at Physics? (Absolutely speaking I am not as good at it as the other 'studs') How do I know that I won't lose interest in it when I take an MS, as I did with Physics? What do I call myself after I pass out? An Electrical Engineer? Or A Physicist? Or An Engineering Physicist (I have rarely ever used Physics for Engineering, both the subjects were almost mutually exclusive)? Is this because of EP or would my situation have been the same even if I had taken some other branch?

Should students be forced to choose a specific branch when they are joining college? Shouldn’t they be allowed to do the courses you are interested in and then be awarded a degree based on them? There are Branch changes and Branch slides for people who want to do them but we know that not everyone gets to do them. Even there you have to choose a branch at the end of your first semester and by then you wouldn’t even have known what your current branch is like. So I guess ‘General Engineering’, which Prof.Bhaskar Ramamurthy once briefly mentioned in class in some other context, might the best way out of this.