PGDBA at IIM Calcutta, 1st semester at ISI Calcutta.
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We reached ISI campus on 19th July. We were given accommodation at 4th and 5th floor of CD Deshmukh Bhavan. It was a twin sharing accommodation. Every room was well furnished and spacious with attached bathrooms. Round the clock Wifi and  Lift facility were available for us. Mess facility was arranged at Rani bhavan which was 3-4 minutes walk from our hostel.

Our first semester classes started on 20th July 2015.Our class schedule was not very hectic. We had two 2-hours classes per day. But as time passed we started having extra classes in the evening and it started getting hectic. Initially our classes started at NAB-1 at ground floor of AN Kolmogorov bhavan. Buildings at ISI are named after personalities. Size of batches are very small at ISI, Normally they have close to 20 students in a batch(It shows hot competitive it is to get into ISI :-)). So classes are of small size. Ours was largest batch for ISI with 51 students, and there weren't  class rooms for a class this large. So our class started in NAB-1 which was a small auditorium. Meanwhile ISI started making a class room for us. After a month we got out own class room in Satyendra nath bose bhavan at 5th floor :-).

We had five papers in first semester. Profs Amitava Banerjee taught us statistical inference, Prof Bimal Roy and Prof Kishan taught us stochastic processes, Prof Sourav sengupta taught us computing in data sciences, Prof Debashish Sengupta taught us Statistical structures in data and Prof Pinakpani pal and Prof. Amiya das taught us DBMS.

Highly qualified and experienced professors were again highlight of the courses at ISI. I mean where will you get professor who is a Padm-shree awardee.I am talking about Profs. Bimal Roy. He is one of the brightest professors,statistician and Cryptologist in India . He comes off as an absolute genius. He taught us probability and time series. His classes were full of real time project experiences. He showed us how probability can be used to crack and solve real life problems. He shared some very interesting problems he solved using probability theory and statistics in his career.

Dr Sourav sengupta taught us computing in data science. From the first class he motivated us in the subject. He is extremely good in subject and has real passion for teaching. He started with Linear Algebra concepts and then some of machine learning algorithms. He planned the course extremely well. He created a website page for our course where he would put the all the course resource like references, class scribes etc.  It was very helpful having that page for our batch because we could refer to stuff he discussed in class whenever  we wanted. He got nick name "Interstellar" from our batch because of heavy discussions of high dimensions in his class :-). Initially the course looked very tough and complex, but as we started putting effort it became lucid. He made the subject very interesting and motivated the whole batch towards data science.He also encouraged us not to call him sir and just call him Sourav Da :-). He is extremely friendly and addresses us "Hi friends" in his mails as well :-).

Profs Debashish sengupta was meticulous and very formal in his class. He covered every topic rigorously. He started with basics of statistics and slowly dived into complex multivariate analysis. We thought it was the easiest subject initially, but it became extremely loaded and toughest course when multivariate analysis started.Every one should be fully attentive in his class as, this course is inherently tough, specially multivariate analysis part. Best part of this course was, professor gave us unsolved questions from our textbook as assignments and those were discussed in the class. This helped us, as we had to read the chapter to do assignments, and that prepared us well for our examination. Students should expect very complex mathematical derivations and problems in this course. So, i would advise next batch students to study what was taught in the class the same day at your room.

Profs Amitava banerje was a bit casual in his style. He focused more on real life examples than theory from the book. He discussed basics of statistics very well. He has vast experience of doing consultancy in many projects for industry. And he shared his real life experiences in the class to explain concepts. He encouraged us to think and convert real life problems as statistical problems. His assignments also helped us, in relating the concepts to real life problems. He was extremely busy, so some of his classes were cancelled :-(. He finished the syllabus a bit in hurry in the end.

There were also guest lectures from professors who were doing research on many Analytics projects. Sourav da invited them and they presented their research topics. Those sessions were very interesting. One unique thing at ISI , professors are not obliged to teach here, i mean they can do full time research and not take classes at all(Got to know this from Sourav Da :-)). So ISI is more of a research institution than a normal college.

Other than studies, we also had fun. Singing mehfils, Deewali celebrations, late night Maggie(Maggie came back around November after the ban:-)) to name a few. We also had a Fest-Eve in international students hostel ,where my batch mates performed and we enjoyed a lot. There were some issues in mess after pooja holidays , and Jaideep and Bodhi came to our rescue ;-). New arrangement was made in CV Raman boys hostel for us for last month. Food was far far better here than Rani bhavan.

Over all i would summarize the first semester as a very good learning experience. We learnt the basics of data science and Analytics. Now we are ready to imbibe more complex concepts at IIT Kgp on the basic foundations we got this semester. I am really looking forward to the semester at IIT Kgp, specially the spring fest :-).