Twenty years ago (II)

Twenty years ago I took my first college course on circuit analysis. I barely can remember who my professor was. I only have a fuzzy image of him. At the moment we were ready to start the exam, he gave us some silly recommendations about how to write clearly our answers. If I think about my former circuit analysis classmates, as a group it was a very traumatized group. They were very frustrated about how they were treated by the department.

More than ninety percent of my classmates had been more than five years at the electrical engineering department. And there they were. All of them stuck, still taking and retaking the very first course on circuit analysis. Some of those students wanted me to believe some of their urban legends. They liked to tell stories about an evil, malicious, and wicked professor who always did bad to students.  I do not know how those stories affected me. If they did affect me they  just made me to study harder.

However, in retrospect I have to say that exams were far beyond of what was given in the lectures. Some of the intellectual exercises we were asked to solve were presented just to show how smart the professor was.

Urban legend

Years later I learned that I was not mistaken. Fellow senior professors were very proud about how hard they were with those exams. They also created their own urban myths. One of those myths said that an Italian delegation that came to our department, as part of an international aid program, got scared the shit out of them. It happen because at the moment they got into the building the circuit analysis exam solution was posted in the front wall. The exam was the prove how clever the lecturer was.