The "Free" Lunch

In a way, we, the students and alumni of BUET are very very lucky. We got a world class education for only about a total of 10,000 taka or less. Most of it is refunded as scholarships. I still remember that the rent for my dorm room was only taka 55. No, that's not even per month, it's per year!!!

The hidden truth is, there's no free lunch. The "free" education was funded by the poorest of the poor people of Bangladesh. So, it is our duty to return something for the people of Bangladesh. Alumni of BUET already do that ... for example, the Intel Bangladesh Association has created a great lab at the EEE department. The contributions need not be monetary, it is possible to help students or other people in many different ways. Bangladesh doesn't have a good web presence, you can work towards building it by contributing to Wikipedia. In any case, we must remember the faith our people put on us ... that's a big responsibility.

Open Source Technology

In 1999, during my BUET undergrad days, my friend PPM and I wanted to install Linux. At that time, there were only a few people in BUET who had heard about Linux, let alone install it. So, we kind of did it blindly, with some help from Susham bhai (batch 92). The rest of the BUET students were happy with their pirated copies of Windows and all types of software. Even our cse lab had plenty of pirated, unlicensed copies of Microsoft software.

Time have changed. Now, almost everyone knows of Linux, and a large number of students have installed it. However, it is disheartening that the department hasn't adopted it as a development environment. This results in students not learning any LaTeX, coding in gcc, or even vi. So, whenever these students arrive in grad school, suddenly, they are immersed in Open source technology, and go through a "khabi-khawa" phase. Most of the universities in USA are almost completely based in Linux or Solaris. And acadmic courses mostly use Linux based systems.

So, this is what students need to do: Learn the following things - Basic Linux commands, LaTeX, gcc, vi. These are the minimal set of things, there are plenty of other things.

Also, students need to have a sense of IP. Pirating software is not a good thing. Sure, in BD people do it, but that doesn't mean it is a thing you should do. Because, there are plenty of good alternatives.

BUET qualifies for ICPC

BUET Exceed, a team from CSE BUET, has qualified for the ACM International Collegiate Programming contest. This is the 9th consecutive time BUET is participating there.