Always never late to learn

It was 7:45 in the morning, and that was when I woke up. I then started running around because I was running late to college. Usually, I wake up at 7:00 am and leave home at 8:00 am to reach college at 8:30 am. With just fifteen minutes remaining all I could think of is to skip my breakfast. I informed my mother, I would have breakfast in college as I was running late. She shook her head and asked me to drink milk and go to college. I took my motorcycle to get going to my college.

By speeding up a little I was able to reach college by 8:35 am. I had to run to get to my class and I found my staff still hadn’t reached my classroom. After a few minutes our faculty came and we had welcomed her by standing up and wishing her “good morning ma’am”. She was a bit surprised to see everybody present in our class which never happened since the beginning of this semester. She asked us to sit and questioned how our weekend was? Later she started explaining about risk benefit analysis.

As time passed by, I started losing interest and began thinking about random ideas that struck my mind. Later I heard a voice saying “let us see how good engineers are you.” Then our faculty drew a graph on the blackboard and asked us to analyze it.

This was the graph drawn.

Performance measure vs number of patients


She gave us five minutes and asked us to analyze this graph and write about a minimum of five points. As the entire class started concentrating in this graph, our classroom became very silent. After five minutes she (faculty) asked does anybody have five points? Nobody raised their hand and she was shocked. She then asked how many had one point and so on. She was stopped at two where three students had put up their hands. The maximum number of points students in our class got was four.

After being asked individually she had it all summarised as follows:

  • If this is to be considered as a hospital then it had an increase in performance measure for normal patients.
  • There is a decrease in performance measure which then becomes stable for abnormal patients.
  • The performance measure is high when there are a minimum number of abnormal patients, but when the number of patient’s increases, performance measure decreases.

She then told when I told you people to analyze the graph all you did was analyze what is inside the graph but left out all those that was outside. Later she told us a few points.

  • This is Performance measure vs. Number of patient’s graph.
  • This graph is normalized between 0-1.

All of you had concentrated on bigger things, but left out what was easy to be identified. Why do you always think these small things won’t be considered important? This made me realize how analyzing a graph would seem difficult. We might say engineers are all problem solvers, but never neglect anything thinking it would not be valuable or important. Do not decide on what others would value.

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