Getting admitted to the best in BD

We at the RS are all patriots and we love those who share our sense of patriotism. And one way to take this deshi pride to a higher level is by not running away to all those foreign universities, a little thing which my editor hates since every year she loses half of her best RS staff to the lures and allures of those big shot international universities.

Well, guess what, the lure of the foreign hawa may be great but there are plenty of universities in Bangladesh which are definitely worth considering for pursuing your academic goals. The prospect of university education is getting bigger and bigger here, especially with the sudden influx of private universities. But truth be told, nothing yet beats the public universities in terms of prestige and academics and so every year there is a clamour to get admitted there.

English medium students are at a disadvantage here since they don't really know the way to apply to these places. Here I come in. Today we will talk about some of the best public universities in Bangladesh and talk about how to apply and what to expect from them during admissions.

Medical College:
Becoming a doctor is probably the hardest thing you can jump into but if you are seriously into it, you should get going from the very beginning. Otherwise, you're in trouble. For admission to all the government medical colleges in Bangladesh, the candidates have to take one common admission test and according to their results, they get selected to the corresponding medical colleges. There are currently 14 public medical colleges and students get selected according to the college rank. But the colleges have recently increased their enrolment to 175 students for the entering class and there's a new public college in Dhaka in addition to the two from before which definitely is great news for all the enthusiastic future doctors out there. Now there's more possibility for them to get into these sought after university!

So, about the admission procedure and exam:
The total evaluation is out of two hundred marks, and half of it counts for your HSC and SSC results (O and A levels for English medium students following the GCE curriculum). The remaining hundred is on the admission test, which is an hour-long exam consisting of 100 Multiple Choice Questions. The assessment is based on the three sciences Biology (Zoology and Botany), Chemistry and Physics along with some questions on General Knowledge and English grammar. The syllabus for the sciences is that of the HSC curriculum and hence an extra amount of effort has to come from all the English medium students in their battle to digest the two-year syllabus within the four months before the test. But the good thing for these candidates is that all the questions will be translated in English for their convenience, so no, you folks don't have to worry about those incomprehensible terms used in the Bengali texts. Also a point to remember is that all candidates who have not given HSC or SSC have to get their corresponding secondary or higher secondary results evaluated to the GPA mode. This procedure should be done with the DGHS office located in Mohakhali.

To get the best preparation most of the students are seen running from one coaching centre to the next but nonetheless it brings you into a routine and helps you with the numerous model exams and weekly tests conducted by these centres. I'd prefer two among the countless which seem to spring up everyday. Try out the 'Primet Programme' at Farmgate and 'Shubhechha' also in Farmgate.

Institute of Business Administration (IBA), University of Dhaka:
The IBA program of Dhaka University is popular and prestigious. Getting in almost guarantees you a very high paying job in various business firms in Dhaka, including the multinationals. The admission procedure is comparatively simple and the entry exam is quite similar to that of the SAT reasoning test. But in contrast to SAT I, there are three sections: Math, English and Analytical. The math section is mostly based on basic concepts but a downfall is the prohibition of calculators…so for students accustomed to using this device to solve the simplest of problems, well this section is a challenge, but nothing that can't be overcome with regular practice. English is basically grammar and comprehension (similar to the critical reading section of SAT I) with the occasional Analogy questions thrown in front of you to make life a tad more difficult.

'Analytical' consist of mostly puzzles and critical reasoning in a very crude attempt to test your IQ. (Personally I don't see how reasoning that Jack likes pizza from the fact that Jack likes what Jill likes and Jill likes Pizza is an indicative of a high IQ, but that's beside the point). All this has to be done under a 90 min time period and after that you move onto answer an additional 'Writing' section in which you have to produce two short pieces of writing under thirty minutes.

Each year around 150-175 are selected and called for the 'Interview'. The Interview is gruelling (or so it is rumoured) and from there, the final group of 70 students who make up the batch for that year is chosen. If you want to join a coaching centre for the IBA exam, I'd recommend 'Mentors'; they're pretty disciplined and have several branches through the city, which is quite convenient.

Bangladesh University of Engineering & Technology (BUET)
For prospective engineers and architects, the first preference is of course BUET. Hence the competition for admission is pretty intense to say the least. To be eligible for the admission test and for the English medium candidates must have a minimum of grade B in each of the three subjects: Math, Physics and Chemistry in the Advanced level Examinations or their equivalents, but the requirement is often subject to change. As for the admission exam, candidates for the engineering and URP (Urban & Regional Planning) programs have to sit for a 3 hour-long exam on Physics, Chemistry, Math and English. It is a 600-mark exam with the sciences, each one taking up 30% of the assessment with 10% on English. The candidates for 'Architecture' have to sit for the 'Free Hand Drawing' section, instead of the Chemistry section. All in all it's cut throat competition from which a total of 825 students are admitted each year. The syllabus is also based on the HSC curriculum like in medical. Recommended coaching centres are 'Sunrise' in Dhanmondi and 'Omeca' located at Farmgate.

So all the prospective candidates out there, hope this helps and whatever you do never ever stress yourself right before the test and cramp your much needed brains. Good luck and happy studying!

By Subehee Ahmed

What's the difference between 'magic' and 'magick'? Is magic real or just cheap tricks? How 'cool' magic is as a career? All these and more were discussed over a cup of coffee with a punk haired smart guy. Welcome on stage, Tony the magician!

With no master to teach him, he learnt it all by himself following a book called 'Magic and Illusion' by Tommy Tonson. What a remarkable coincidence! 'Tony' is his name and 'Tommy' his faraway master's! When asked what had inspired him, he said, “As a child I practiced small tricks but when I grew up David Blaine's 'Street Magic Shows' inspired me to take up magic seriously. In fact Blaine is my 'idol'.” Tony even learned to levitate! Besides levitation and a huge number of amazing card tricks, he knows how to create a voodoo doll!

With the support of his mother he has no problem in pursuing his dream 'to be a real magician' which he claims he is. As a career, 'Magic' isn't a prudent choice, he tells us. “Superstitions still prevail. “Most of those who see me performing tell me that magic is against religion, which is absolutely wrong. And because of these prevailing superstitions a lot of people still avoid magic so performing magic isn't profitable in this country.”

So what will be his profession? This young magician is a student of the Independent University, Bangladesh (IUB) attending BBA classes. But that may not be his final destination because he likes to do something of everything and has no idea about where he may ultimately land up. His ambition for now is to promote 'Street Magic' in Bangladesh. So someday when you are walking on the road, you may find him entertaining the passers-by with his magic. He also weaves brilliant magic for fund-raising programs, stage shows, parties, and this is a part-time job for him.

Tony surprisingly looks more like a model than a magician and when asked about it, he laughed, “It's not necessary to wear a dark robe to practice magic, something the Potter culture has magnified.” How about spells? “Spells too are just to create a dramatic atmosphere. A magician needs to say the spell in his mind, he doesn't need to yell.”

So do the spells sound like some alien language? Tony answers it this way, “Spells are one's own language. Any language with which the magician is comfortable works. Besides, an experienced magician doesn't even need spells, he can just think and make things happen.”

Can he share a few spells with us? “That's a secret”, he confesses.
But when requested he did burn a card's print on his skin...

By Efadul Huq

Science has always progressed on the basis of logic, and before the 20th century it worked pretty well. Logic seemed to be the driving force in solving most of the science mysteries, and at one point, scientists claimed that every major discovery has already been ready discovered and there wasn't anything left worth pursuing.

That was until Max Planc came into the scene, and showed that Newtonian mechanics cannot govern the laws of subatomic particles. Before anyone gets confused, Newtonian mechanics is the mathematical model governing the laws of the macro world; in other words, the laws governing the motion of cars, planets, human beings, but not subatomic particles.

The first discovery that was leading to the inevitable conclusion that Newtonian mechanics wasn't appropriate for describing the subatomic world was when Max Planc formulated that a black body can attain infinite energy, simply because it will absorb every wavelength so that it stays 'black'.

Now there came a huge problem; not because the scientists involved in formulating the new theory weren't competent, but the new theory was based on a lot of experimental evidence that made no sense. It seemed that although logic played the underlying reasoning in Newtonian mechanics, logic has no place in quantum physics, the field concerned with the behavior of subatomic particles.

Consider this; let's say that you have a date with someone, and at the same time, your friends have arranged this soccer match that you don't want to miss. Following Newtonian mechanics, you have to choose between your date and the soccer match. But according to quantum laws, that would be no problem at all. You can be at the two events at the same time. Pretty strange, isn't it?

The original experiment proving this was pretty straight forward; there was a detector on one side of a screen having two slits for particles to pass through, and there was a device on the other side of the screen which emitted particles. The device emits particles, which go through the slits, and the detector detects them. Without going into too many details, the end result was shocking and made no sense. It turns out that a single particle can go through both the slits at the same time. On top of that, it turns out that this nonsense going on in the particle world makes devices like computers and televisions work. Not only that; if human beings could be governed by the quantum laws, then you could go through walls, disappear in one place and re-appear in another place, be at two places at the same time, and the best thing, we can interact with human beings from other universes. According to quantum theory, particles can do all these with ease.

As soon as this theory was formulated, or rather, this theory is still being formulated, scientists realized that they don't know how exactly particles are doing this, or why the particles are doing that, and soon they figured out that trying to find the underlying logic of the behavior of the subatomic particles would be a complete waste of time.

Quantum physics has far flung reaches in explaining other theories. For instance, physicist throughout the last century has been trying to connect the four forces governing the macro world. So far, they've managed to connect three of the forces together, but it gets complicated when they try to connect it with gravity.

Scientist are using quantum mechanics to figure out new theories that allow the connection of these four forces together in such a way that theory can describe everything in a precise, mathematical form.

So far, as far as I know, that theory hasn't been formulated. But so far, scientists have figured out a lot of practical application of quantum physics.

Teleportation, the technique of moving from one place to another instantaneously, has already been achieved using particles. There are a lot of other applications that scientists know about, but they can't figure out how to go about it, or is just starting to know how to achieve a particular application.

By Asifur Rahman Khan