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In the 37th edition of As We Leave 2026, Nishant Verma, a Y22 student in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, reflects on a college journey that unfolded very differently from what he had once imagined. From initial setbacks in first year to creating places where he belonged. His story reminds us that transformation during these four years is not just about building yourself, but also about breaking the fragile selves within and rebuilding them piece by piece.
Disclaimer:- The views presented below are the author’s own and are not in any manner representative of the views of Vox Populi as a body or IIT Kanpur in general. This is an informal account of the author’s experiences at IIT-K
23th May.
2:03 AM.
Everyone at home is asleep and I’m sitting alone on the sofa trying to write this AWL after procrastinating for days. The funny thing is, for four years I read seniors’ AWLs imagining how people must feel while writing them. Like IITK gives you some grand conclusion in the end and suddenly everything starts making sense.
Sitting here right now, I can confidently say that it doesn’t.
Mostly, it just leaves you with memories that randomly hit while packing cartons, walking through empty corridors, or hearing hostel sounds for what might be the last few times.
And maybe that’s enough.
Chapter 1: Maybe I Was Never Meant For This Place
When I first entered IIT Kanpur, I had all the usual expectations. Movies like 3 Idiots and Chhichhore had already convinced me that college life would automatically become beautiful. Big friend groups, random night-outs, wing culture, emotional moments, lifelong memories.
I think most freshers arrive here carrying that same version of IITK in their heads.
I did too.
But my IITK started very quietly.
I still remember the exact moment my IITK life began.
It was outside Hall 13. My father was standing beside me while I awkwardly looked around trying to process the place, and a senior walked up to me.
“Hi Nishant, your baapu Asjad Raza is occupied somewhere else, chalo main le chalta hoon tumhe tumhare room tak.”
I still remember his name too somehow. Gaurish Bansal.
When I finally entered the room, my roommate was already there. We talked a little initially, the usual introductory conversation everyone has during the first day.
And then… somehow we barely talked after that.
For context, I was an extremely introverted person. The actual awkward type. The kind of person who rehearses sentences before speaking and then still decides not to say them. To make matters worse, IITK gave me a roommate who was even more introverted than me, haha.
Though people in my wing (B1 Hall-13) were genuinely nice, I just couldn’t become part of the flow. Everyone around me looked like they were settling in naturally while I spent most evenings pretending to be busy so nobody noticed I was alone.
Most evenings during the first semester looked almost identical. Around sunset, I would leave my room and start walking slowly in front of Hall 13 for no particular reason. Sometimes with earphones. Sometimes without. Mostly just thinking about life and wondering why this place already felt easier for everyone else.
The campus looked alive in a way I couldn’t participate in yet.
There was one exception though, Ankit. For almost the entire first semester, he was my only proper friend on campus. At that time, one friendship was carrying my entire social life.
And somewhere around then, things back home also started becoming difficult. Family health issues, constant stress, phone calls that could suddenly ruin the entire day…slowly everything started piling up together. I stopped going out much. Missed fresher events. Stayed in my room for hours doing absolutely nothing except overthinking.
I would sit for hours staring at my laptop without actually doing anything meaningful. Open the same apps repeatedly. Scroll endlessly through my phone. Pretend to work. Pretend to text people. Pretend I had somewhere to be.
Sometimes I wasn’t even avoiding people. I was avoiding the feeling of not belonging around them.
Mess dinners became silent routines too. I’d usually go alone, eat quickly, and leave before conversations around me started becoming too noticeable. Even small things started feeling strangely difficult. I remember during one wing birthday celebration, everyone had gathered outside in the corridor shouting, laughing, smearing cake on each other’s faces while I quietly waited inside my room hoping things would calm down soon enough for me to leave unnoticed.
The room slowly became my whole world.
Then midsems happened.Then endsems.
One F. And almost all Ds everywhere else.
I still remember staring at the grades for a long time because for the first time in my life, I genuinely felt academically broken. Until then, I had always believed hard work eventually fixes things. IITK was the first place that taught me effort and outcomes don’t always arrive together.
And slowly, without even realizing it, IITK had started changing the way I looked at myself.
For a while, I genuinely thought:
“Maybe I was never meant for this place.”
Chapter 2: Finding Where I Belonged
But IITK has a strange way of changing people. Not suddenly. Slowly.
Somewhere around the end of first semester and the beginning of second semester, while talking to one of my friends, Ishan Prakhar ( someone I had randomly met while texting people before coming to IITK) I understood one thing very clearly: if I wanted to survive here, I had to change. Just enough to stop living entirely inside my own head.
By then, I had also realized that most groups were already formed. Wing groups had become permanent and somehow I still felt outside everything. So I made a simple decision:
If I couldn’t fit into my wing, I’d create my own space outside it.
And weirdly enough, that worked.
I started volunteering in random things. Fests, events, random work, initially just to stay busy and avoid sitting alone in my room all day. But somewhere between random meets, callings, and event work, I slowly started finding people.
Eventually, inside Hall 13 itself, a different wing, A1, slowly became my pseudo-wing because of some amazing people like Shikhar Chaudhary, Mohit Jangid, Sachin Kumar, Nipun Noharia and many more. I started spending more time there than my own corridor, and for the first time since coming to IITK, campus started feeling slightly less lonely.
It still feels strange thinking about it now. Just a few months earlier, I was avoiding groups and silently waiting for wing birthdays to end so I could leave my room unnoticed. And now, slowly, I had started finding spaces where I didn’t constantly feel out of place.
By then, my first summer had started and I chose to become a secretary in E-Cell. (Yes, only E-Cell.) Not because I had some extraordinary startup idea. Mostly because it felt nice belonging somewhere.
At the same time, I also took up a summer project in the Aeromodelling Club. And honestly, looking back now, the way I chose these things was very random. I remember asking one of my baapus what I should explore and he simply replied, “Whatever you like or want to try.”
And like a normal kid, my imagination immediately went toward airplanes and startups.
So I ended up there.
But somewhere during the Aeromodelling project, while cutting cardboard pieces and doing repetitive work, I slowly realized that maybe I wasn’t actually enjoying it as much as I had imagined. At the same time, in E-Cell, I was mostly doing arbitrary database work.
And that’s when I randomly stumbled across a message on InfoGroup about a summer project by PMIG ( Product Management Interest Group).
The problem was: the deadline had already passed.
But fortunately, one of my known seniors from E-Cell, Nishita Gupta, was part of PMIG. I texted her almost immediately and somehow, after submitting the task late, she agreed.
And that small moment quietly changed a huge part of my IITK journey.
I joined the PMIG summer project and later became a secretary there as well.
Side by side, while working in E-Cell, I also got deeply attached to the people there. And that’s one thing IITK teaches you unexpectedly, sometimes you stay in places because of people, not purpose.
I found some of the best people on campus there: Prabhat Mishra, Keshav Khandelwal,Pradnya Govil, Varun Gupta, Sakshi Prakash, Aditi Singh, Dipti Yadav, Anas Ali and many more.
While startup culture fascinated me, I slowly realized I wasn’t ready to build one myself. At least not yet. That’s when product management, through PMIG, entered my life and honestly, something immediately clicked.
Product management felt like the perfect middle ground between creativity, technology, business, psychology, and structured chaos.
And slowly, I got obsessed.
Initially, I started participating in case competitions randomly after E-Summit got over. Then seriously. Then obsessively.
And surprisingly, I started winning most of them too.
Those wins slowly gave me something IITK had quietly taken away during the first year: confidence.
I still remember securing my first remote PM internship through a case competition and thinking:
“Wait… maybe I actually belong somewhere.”
That entire phase changed me a lot.
The introverted guy who once struggled to even talk to people was now discussing product ideas till 3 AM, participating in competitions, organizing sessions, networking with seniors, and pretending to confidently understand frameworks he had googled five minutes earlier.
And strangely, for the first time since coming to IITK, things started feeling natural.
At the same time, another phase arrived, the race for third-year PORs.
And honestly, it became one of the hardest decisions I had taken till then.
I had two options in front of me: choose the E-Cell core team, with the people I genuinely loved spending time with, or choose PMIG, the place that had quietly rebuilt my confidence and career direction.
After a lot of overthinking, I chose PMIG.
Now some people might think this means E-Cell wasn’t good for career growth. Absolutely not. But I never joined E-Cell for a purpose. I joined it because of the people. And somewhere deep inside, I never wanted that feeling to become transactional.
So because of the work I had done for PMIG and the credibility I had slowly built there, I was selected as one of its leaders.
And somehow, even more unbelievably, because of the combined efforts of our team and seniors before us, PMIG eventually became the Product Club of IIT Kanpur.
And I became one of its first coordinators alongside some of the best people IITK gave me Pranjali, Keerthi, and Varad.
To this day, that sentence still feels fake.
We worked a lot during that phase. Not just to make it a good club inside IITK, but genuinely to make it one of the best product clubs among IITs. One of the biggest moments for me personally, was releasing IITK’s first Product Management Casebook.
Because somewhere deep down, it felt bigger than just a club achievement.
It felt like proof that the same person who once spent evenings walking alone outside Hall 13 had finally found a place where he belonged.
Chapter 3: Perfect Timing for Disaster
Because while things outside academics kept growing rapidly, academics themselves were collapsing in the background.
Then internship season arrived. The atmosphere across campus changed completely. Everyone around me was preparing day and night for coding rounds, aptitude tests, and interviews, while I was sitting there trying to figure out how to survive both academics and internships together.
Almost no companies came for product roles. And with my CPI, even thinking seriously about campus internships felt unrealistic. So while most people focused on the campus season, I quietly started applying off-campus.
Cold mails. LinkedIn applications. Random startup forms. Getting rejected and ghosted. Again and again.
Then Phase 1 ended. Most of my friends had internship offers in hand. And me? I hadn’t even properly sat for interviews. That phase genuinely broke me mentally. I slowly disconnected from almost everything else and became obsessed with finding an internship somehow.
And right in the middle of all this came another disaster: Four Fs. In one semester.
I still remember staring silently at the screen, almost numb at that point. It felt absurd honestly, that outside college things were finally improving, but inside IITK academically I was probably at my lowest point.
And the irony part? Around the same time, I started receiving decent onsite internship opportunities. Life at IITK always had perfect timing.
Eventually, nothing worked out properly with onsite internships, and I decided to stay on campus during the summers, clear my courses, and somehow manage a remote internship alongside it.
That summer felt strange. The campus was almost empty. No crowd outside the mess, no random hostel noise, no wing discussions till 4 AM. Most people were away doing internships in different cities while I spent my days attending summer courses and nights working on my internship online. But honestly, that remote internship meant far more to me than it probably should have. Because this time, I had earned it during one of the lowest phases of my college life.
Chapter 4: The Person I Never Planned To Become
Alongside all this, somewhere during sixth semester, IITK unexpectedly pulled me into campus elections.
I didn’t have any political ambitions. It all started casually while supporting the Hall 12 folks during the General Elections, mostly just for fun and because of Prabhat Mishra. But slowly, I started getting deeply attached to the Academics and Career Council (AnC). And more than the council itself, I got attached to its people.
And honestly, that election phase taught me something I feel most IITK students miss entirely.
The internal side of campus life.
The senate discussions. Hall politics. Campaigning chaos. Random midnight strategy talks. Running around hostels convincing people to vote. The people you unexpectedly become close to during those few weeks. The friendships that somehow become stronger than normal semester friendships ever do.
That phase made campus feel alive in a completely different way.
That’s why, if one of your friends ever comes to you saying, “Bhai GC PS lead karna hai, Elections m campaigning karni hai,” just say yes with full enthu.
Because sometimes the best parts of IITK are the ones that never appear on your transcript and resumes.
Anyways, coming back to the story.
After the elections, Apoorv became the General Secretary of AnC. And when he left for his summer internship, I somehow started working as the Acting General Secretary. Initially, it was supposed to be temporary, but surprisingly, that “temporary” period stretched to almost four months ( almost half the tenure).
It still sounds funny saying it out loud.
But those four months taught me more than any classroom probably ever could.
For the first time in my life, I experienced responsibility towards people instead of just responsibility toward myself.
And strangely, that changes you.
I met some of the best juniors during that phase. Honestly, I can’t even mention names because I know I’ll end up missing someone important. But the respect, appreciation, and care I received during that period felt very different from anything I had experienced before.
Not because of the position.
But because of the way you work. The way you listen to people. The way you talk to them. The way people slowly start trusting you.
And for someone like first-year Nishant, the same person who once struggled to even be part of conversations, that feeling was genuinely unfamiliar.
During that tenure, we started multiple initiatives, experimented with random ideas, and somehow managed to build a few meaningful things. Some failed immediately. Some survived. A few actually became something valuable.
I founded entities like the UPSC Group and ShareIITK. And somewhere in the middle of all this came another ambitious idea:
“What if AnC had its own fest?”
And somehow, that idea slowly became reality.
We collaborated with the Department of Management Sciences and started building Prabandhan under AnC itself. And somewhere in the middle of meetings, and endless planning docs, I became the Overall Coordinator of Prabandhan ’26.
Honestly, even now that sentence feels slightly unreal.
Because if first-year Nishant saw this version of me, he probably would’ve quietly assumed this was somebody else’s story.
Chapter 5: Maybe I Was Meant To Stay
And after the internship season ended, placement season arrived.
But for me, this season was never just about getting a job.
It was about surviving six DC courses in the seventh semester while preparing for placements at the same time.
But thankfully, by then, life at IITK no longer felt as difficult as it once did.
I had found some amazing friends in the branch like Prashant Shekhar, Divyansh Shah, Anshuman Singh, Nikhil Kumar and many more. Honestly, I have rarely seen people care more about my academics than I did myself.
And somewhere because of them, IITK slowly started becoming happier and fun.
The atmosphere across campus also changes completely during placement season. IITK webmail and RAS portal notifications start controlling everyone’s emotions. People disappear into interview prep, aptitude tests, mock interviews, PPTs, and endless discussions about shortlists. Every conversation somehow starts revolving around placements even when nobody wants to admit it.
And somewhere during all this, something inside me had also changed.
I had stopped panicking the way first-year Nishant used to.
After surviving so many academic disasters already, I think I had unknowingly learned how to stay calm inside chaos. Somewhere along the way, I became one of the most chill people during placement season, at least from the outside.
And honestly, that still feels absurd to think about.
Because there was a time when I couldn’t even properly talk to people in my own wing.
But somehow, very unintentionally, I became one of the faces of product management preparation on campus. The funny part was that people with much better academics than me sometimes came to me for guidance, preparation help, mock interviews, or simply reassurance before interviews.
Some of my favourite IITK memories now come from those random preparation sessions.
Sitting with people before interviews trying to calm each other down while all of us were equally stressed ourselves. Explaining frameworks to someone five minutes before interviews. Random calls at 2 AM. Running across the campus for walk-ins for your beloved friends. Watching people slowly gain confidence after conversations.
And somewhere during all this, I realized something beautiful:
Everyone is fighting something. Some battles are just invisible.
Maybe IITK was never about competing with each other all the time. Sometimes, it was just a bunch of equally confused people trying to help each other survive.
Because maybe when you spend years figuring things out the hard way, you unknowingly become capable of helping others survive their difficult phases too.
Because by then, IITK no longer felt like just an institute.
It had become people.
People I could randomly call at 2 AM.
People like Surya Shukla, who was never really part of any specific chapter of this story, yet somehow remained an important part of all of it.
Those Literature Café chai and maggie at 4 in the morning where half the group discussed life while the other half was just fighting sleep. The last Antaragni and Udghosh where everyone was suddenly “too nostalgic” for a campus they spent years complaining about. Random photoshoots in formals as if we were all graduating from some Netflix series. Farewell gifts. Sitting outside Hall 1 or OAT for hours doing absolutely nothing important.
This was ending.
And somewhere in between all of this, placements quietly stopped being only about jobs.
They became proof to myself that maybe I had actually survived this place.
And finally, during my last semester, after everything. the Fs, the backlogs, the confusion, the self-doubt, the overthinking, and all the academic disasters in between, things somehow worked out.
I secured some really good offers.
And more importantly:
I completed my degree on time.
And while leaving this beautiful campus on the 17th May, sitting quietly in the car and replaying these entire four years in my head, I remember thinking:
“Damn… somehow we actually made it.”
And strangely, instead of remembering grades, placements, or CPI, all I could remember were people.
And honestly, after spending years trying to survive this place, I ended up loving it.
Epilogue :
If you have read till here, maybe you now know me a little better than before.
So, how was it?
Maybe most people who know me would describe me as one of the chillest guys at IITK. And honestly, if I wanted to, I could have written this story very differently, only with the fun moments, the laughs, the fests, the friendships, and the memories.
But maybe AWL was never about pretending everything was perfect.
Maybe it is simply about being honest.
And that’s what IITK really was for me.
Not a perfect story. Not the journey I imagined while checking the JoSAA allotment site for the first time. Just four years of falling apart, rebuilding myself, finding amazing people, losing myself sometimes, and slowly becoming someone I had never imagined before.
Because sometimes, the journey isn’t about becoming anything. It’s about unbecoming everything that isn’t really you… so you can finally become who you were meant to become.
And maybe, in the end, that matters more.
And I guess it’s finally time to say the same thing every senior before me once said, and every senior after me eventually will: Goodbye, IITK.
PS: I started writing this at exactly 2:03 a.m., and as Ted once said, “Nothing good happens after 2:00 a.m.” , but maybe Ted was wrong here 🙂
With love,
Signing Off,
Nishant Verma
220725
Written by : Nishant Verma
Edited by : Amirtha Sreya S, Akash Baudh
