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I recently saw this brilliant video explaining the implications of the presence or absence of alien life. To me it was just a good thought experiment to undertake - what the implications of being alone or not alone could be. There was, however, one concept that caught my attention - that of an evolutionary barrier called ‘The Great Filter’ which most civilisations would be unable to cross and hence perish. I felt maybe the idea of a ‘Great Filter’ expounded here wasn’t limited to just our evolution as a civilisation.

For some authors, their writing style is molded by the story they are trying to tell. A whimsical style for a kids or comic storyline, a brooding style for a thriller or mystery book, and so on. However, for some, their stories are molded by their writing style. An easy example of this is Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises”. Salinger’s masterpiece “The Catcher in the Rye” is also one of those wonderful books.

If you’re reading this series, you’re probably enrolled in engineering or some other equivalent professional course. You might be considering applying to foreign universities for a master’s degree. Choosing the right universities to apply to is a tricky job, one even a seasoned counselor may not be able to fulfil. Keeping that in mind, I will enlist below some tips, some tricks, that I learnt during my search for the right universities. I didn’t use all of them, and they won’t apply to each and every student who goes for masters. But they’re worth writing down, in case it helps even a few.

I came into college an eager fresher. Even before college began, I started working on CS, learning the programming languages Java, C, C++, and Python over the summer. In my batch, very few seemed to have this kind of exposure to CS, having just escaped the competitive examinations. Of course, being the n00b I was, I thought learning as many programming languages as you can was the whole point of CS. Boy, was I wrong.

For a majority of Indian teens, the 11th and 12th grades are a struggle. We are going through the mess that is puberty, are preparing blindly for competitive exams like JEE, CET, NEET, NAT, CPT, etc., and are overall in a really bad place. But that’s not the worst part; the worst part is when you get through it all just barely and ask yourself the question - “What next?” You get into a mediocre engineering / medical / architecture college or just barely scrape through to IPCC but have no clue what to do next. The various opportunities and possibilities scare you because you’ve never really had so many choices of such grave importance.