Dear Junior

Lessons learned from 25 months of college life

11 min readAug 20, 2017

College life indeed is the golden period of one’s life. Your life changes upside down, and you finally leave your home to take on the world. I joined IIIT Allahabad in 2015, and know how overwhelming it can get for a first-year student. Away from home, monotonous classes, new faces. I know that feeling. For the first week here, I was filled with awe. “How the eff is everyone here good at anything and everything?” Guitar, Table Tennis, Drums, Singing. You name it; you will find a national champion. The only thing I was good at was solving HC Verma problems, which everyone else was as well.

Well the times have changed, I am currently in the 5th semester of my engineering and life is pretty much settled now. Despite the many great memories I have had in college till now, I would be lying if I told you that your engineering experience will always be easy and straightforward. There will be plenty of challenges and obstacles along the way, but it is through adversity where you find out who you truly are.

I’d like to share with the freshmen, some major things I’ve learned over the last two years. I’ll cover some general life advice rather than emphasize on technical aspects like How to learn to code or How to prepare for campus placements. These are my personal views, so feel free to comment and discuss if your thoughts don’t align with mine.

You have to start all over again

Most freshers, in the beginning, have a feeling in their heart that they are destined for IIT or some other greater stuff.

“I don’t belong here”- Get this feeling out of your brain. Don’t waste your time thinking about that one question that you misread in JEE-Advance or how you forgot to mark answers in OMR, else you would have been in one of the IITs. Move on with that. Since you have to spend next 4/5 years here, the earlier to get on with it, the better. Your all accomplishments till school life are now a mere certificate. Though they may provide you with a little edge somewhere, they don’t matter. Every guy, including you, was a star of his school, college, family, colony or town. That’s why he is here. The worst thing you can do here is to be arrogant about your achievements.You need to start afresh here.

CGPA Matters

Yes, it does, and many people realize this in the final year when it’s too late to recover. The better grades you have, more the opportunities you will get. Surely there will be some seniors who will try to misguide you by saying “CGPA doesn’t matter. This and that guy got placed at 30 lacs and had only 6 pointer”. Kindly ignore this bullshit. Yeah, there are exceptional cases, but not every 6 pointer gets placed. The Majority of the companies that come for recruitment at engineering colleges have a cutoff of pointer, below which you are not allowed to sit for the hiring process. CG (you’ll get used to such abbreviations in college) is one of the most important things which you will take away from campus. It will be a tag along with you for at least the next ten years. It will be an important factor to get a good job or get into a good MBA college. Even while applying for MS in foreign universities, your CG counts. Admission committees use your GPA to determine whether you can handle the course load or not. A low GPA makes them question your aptitude and ability to manage the curriculum.

Seniors to the rescue

See your seniors as your big brothers/sisters (except crushes). Approach them if you have any doubts. You may feel a little awkward in the beginning, but soon everything will be okay. Learn lessons from their experience to avoid hurdles. They can guide you better since they are the people who have survived in the college. Life is too short to learn from your own mistakes. Also, try to maintain a healthy relationship with your professors, keep communicating with them on a regular basis. Don’t be hesitant while asking your doubts and raising queries. You can get a lot of internship/placements opportunities through your professors and seniors, so it is better to be in touch with some.

But beware, not all the bearded guys you will meet in the college are Charles Darwin having the perfect origin theory; some are MSG (Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh) who can impress you with their innuendos but in a developed world don’t make any sense. Take every senior’s advice with a pinch of salt. Not all of them have grown up since JEE, many of them have shrunken instead. The sad part is, the good ones are difficult to find, and the other ones will always be at your doorsteps. Search for former ones instead of the latter.

F.R.I.E.N.D.S

Make friends, not friend-circles. In college, you might find people who you think are your real “bros”, but won’t be there when you need them. Learn to differentiate, the earlier, the better. Bless yourself with 3–4 close friends rather than 20 folks who won’t be there when you need them. This might be a cliché but is important. Make a handful of close friends, with whom you’d spend your entire engineering life, and choose them wisely. Have friends that keep you motivated throughout your journey. Travel to places together, be it unplanned road trips or some college festivals. Attending other college festivals and events will help you get exposure, so try to visit as many as you can. You will even cherish the pointless talks about the life you had with your group at 3 in the morning. At the end of four years, it will be the people and the memories that you will remember and not the grades you achieved.

Use your time productively

Your time is valuable. It’s a limited, finite resource that, once used, can never be reclaimed. It’s okay to watch a youtube video or two, to relax but spending a dozen hours daily on watching TV shows and movies are not going to take you anywhere. There are better ways to spend your time on the internet. You can take tons of free MOOCs, read books, watch TED videos, etc. which ultimately will help you in the long-term.

Master the art of saying NO

Learn to say NO. No to smoking. No to alcohol. No to drugs. There’s no swag in them. You will not look cool at all. You will waste your glorious four years of your life by doing so. You will always be offered to drink and smoke by some of your friends. Just don’t do it to look cool and stylish. It’s never just one puff. Do not succumb to peer pressure. Your college buddies will try to convince you to get the feeling of getting high but, you should learn the art of saying NO.

Speak Up

Sharing ideas, jumping into debates, and asking for what you want, can be scary. But speaking up in situations when you want to express your feelings, is so important, both for your professional as well as personal life. Ask that teacher how did the time complexity come out to be O(1) and not O(n). Ask that girl if she wants to go for a coffee tonight. Ask your senior, how was your interview experience. It’s 2017; your communication skills count as much as your technical skills if not more.

Care about what other people think, and you will always be their prisoner.
— Lao Tzu

Speak up; no one will judge you because, to be frank, you’re not that special. No one in today’s smartphone-crazed society has time in their schedule to think more than a brief second about us. The fact of the matter is, when we do have time to get our thoughts straight, we’re too busy thinking about ourselves and our own shortcomings — not others.

Don’t worry about placement packages

One of the things I hate about the Indian Education System that people judge a college by its average package. College life is much more than getting a fat-ass pay cheque after four years. Unless you’ve have financial constraints in your life, if you’re already worried about how much you’ll be earning after college, I’m sorry to say, but you have already put the first wrong step in your life. It’s just the beginning of your professional career, focus on building it rather than running after money.

Take Care of runs; the dollars will take care of themselves.
— Alan Border

I agree that ambition needs a driver, but setting goals like getting one crore package after your graduation, rather being a driver, results in anxiety. We must focus on the path, not the final destination. In essence, one must chase the performance goals and let the results take care of itself.

Stop Comparing yourself with others

You are not Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg or any other poster child entrepreneur. And that’s okay. We all start out in different places, and everyone’s journey is unique. Drawing comparison is a complete waste of time. Just be yourself. Never compare yourselves to others since you have no control what others are doing. Focus on yourself rather than whining about why everyone is better than you. If your friend is a better coder than you, you should focus on why he’s better, what exactly he’s doing. Have some healthy competition!

Another thing that I’d like to talk about is, don’t follow the herd. Don’t just code because your roommate is doing it. Code because you want to. If you don’t, it’s okay to take the road less taken. Following your passion is much more important than following a crowd of people who don’t know what they are doing.

There are ample of fields for you to excel in.Once you find programming is no fun anymore — drop it. Play soccer, find a girlfriend, study something not related to programming, just live a life — programming contests are only programming contests, and nothing more. Don’t let them become your life — for your life is much more exciting and colorful. The most common misconception we students of IIITA have is that they need to code to excel in life. Don’t code just because you want a good job, don’t code because your friend is doing, don’t code if you don’t find it interesting. Code only when you are passionate about it, you love it, you want to make it your life. Programming is fun; you must enjoy it. If you don’t enjoy it then drop it and find something that you would enjoy doing and excel at it.

Your attitude defines your career not the magnitude of your talent

Talent can give you a head start but ultimately, what you do with that talent matters. Beyond a point, your attitude counts for far more than talent alone. There have been instances in the history, when incredibly talented people when faced a roadblock didn’t know what to do next because they never had to struggle to succeed, talent had done it for them. Vinod Kambli was 25 when he was bounced by Courtney Walsh in Bombay in 1994; he didn’t know what to do next, just did not know how to play the bouncing ball. He did not play a test match after that, just because since talent had solved everything before. In elite services, they don’t pick you if you have never failed, the reason being what if you face a roadblock, will you know what to do? They pick people who have failed and bounced back because that’s where your attitude comes in. When you’re talking about in being top 1%, everyone will possess the same talent, but it’s the attitude that matters. [1]

Sachin Tendulkar played 55 games as a 14-year-old without a break. 55 days. He practiced for two hours, play a game, practice for two hours and fall asleep on the dining table. And he did those 55 days in a row. That is the attitude. Talent opens the first door, it might open the second door, but it is not going to open the last door for you.

Nothing Short of 100 Percent Can Ever Be Enough to Succeed

Always give your 100% in life (unless you’re donating blood). It’s far too easy to waste our time, money, and energy by not committing wholeheartedly to something important to us, but great things are never easy. Whatever opportunities you get in the college life, grab them with both hands and give your 100% without thinking about “Where will I use Circuit Synthesis or Differential Equations in my life?”. Steve Job’s famous Connecting the dots story advocated the same idea.

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.
— Steve Jobs

The point is making the process of achievement supreme and the results irrelevant. Perfect the process of performance, and don’t allow the pressure of performance to choke you.

Closing Notes

Don’t think that your life is chill once you get in. Getting in is no guarantee that you will be successful in life. The truth is if you want to secure your future you have to keep on working. Be ready for 4/5 years of fun-filled and enjoyable, yet challenging and arduous time of your life. Whatever you do, just remember one thing, your activities during these years will shape your future. Don’t follow the crowd, do something that others are not doing. Don’t be afraid to ask seniors/faculty for help.

Khush Raho! Machate Raho! 😁