Remembering Garima Sethi (Jun 2025)

Other Journaling Days

Fictional illustration of a real person using ChatGPT

This was in 2010.
I first came across Garima Sethi mam when I joined my classmates from 2009 batch in the middle of third semester.

I had got an year back in first year but that rule was lifted for the students from current academic session. “Year Back” rule was a brutal decision by the GGSIPU against the students not serious in studies or not securing a minimum amount of score or percentage in the exams.

In the first year, I mostly wasted my time in fooling myself into thinking that if I would sit for IITJEE for a second time, maybe I would get better results. It turned out I was having a disturbed sleep and waking hours from more than normal amount of caffeine intake.

Well, I was sleeping in the 6 hours long exam due to not drinking tea in the break after the first half of the exam consisting of two sessions.

I may have digressed but what I wanted to share was that I was already in a bad shape even before I was going to meet Garima Sethi. Garima Sethi, who was going to make my life hell.

Surprisingly, she had one of the few important subjects during that time (my time of 2009-2013, before Data Analytics, Data Science, Machine Learning, AI or Gen AI were there).

In the third semester, she was teaching Data Structures and Algorithms. A more detailed analysis and design of algorithms came 4rth semester as taught by Prashant Sharma sir, the subject was called ADA (abbreviation of Algorithms – Design and Analysis).

The grudge I held against her… well, I held multiple grudges but this seems to be one of the first and foremost one. 

In the time that I was absent from the third semester and attending classes in new Humanities building with the fresh entrants in new session of first semester, Garima Sethi had already taught one of the most important lessons of DSA.

“Psuedo code can be written in plain English. It doesn’t have to cryptic, it don’t have to be like a programming language itself like how any psuedo-code was written in that TMH book (Schaum's Outline of Data Structures).”

I missed this one detail and suffered with the back in the subject.
It wasn’t just this subject though. I don’t recall what other subjects I got a back log for in third semester but DSA was an important subject.