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In the 46th edition of As We Leave 2026, Tanya Kushwaha, a Y22 student in the Department of Economics, reflects on a college journey shaped as much by setbacks as by successes. From entering IIT Kanpur in search of freedom to grappling with academic struggles, self-doubt, and unfulfilled dreams, she shares an honest account of learning to make peace with imperfection. Through athletics, friendships, and moments of quiet resilience, her story reminds us that not every college journey follows the path we imagine, but every journey leaves us with pieces of ourselves worth carrying forward.
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.
Reader’s Discretion: This write-up is not written intended to be read by others as a blog but is a piece of reminder for myself and thus a way to express and document my emotions for self!
From where shall I begin this As We Leave? Because honestly, it still doesn’t feel like leaving. I have spent weeks avoiding this write-up. I open a blank document multiple times, stare at it for a while, and then close it again. Not because I didn’t know what to write, but because I wasn’t sure if I had a story worth telling. Every year we read AWLs written by people who seem larger than life, people whose names are known across campus, who leave behind legacies, and who have stories that sound straight out of a movie. And then there are people like me. People who spend four years here quietly navigating their own chaos while the world only sees the final outcome.
This AWL is about an average person at IITK who always had that choice to make her own identity in those 4 years not on the basis of what she was already good at but going beyond her own limitations, becoming the kind of person she envisioned herself… but remained a missing name in the campus just like many others!
In fact, if you only looked at my IITK journey from the outside, it would probably look quite perfect. But in reality not every IITK story ends with someone becoming the best version of themselves, and not every story has a filmy ending. Sometimes people leave college carrying achievements they worked hard for while still wondering whether they truly became the person they wanted to be.
There is always a battle going on within us and with time we either learn to defeat it or learn to make peace with it and I lie in the latter one. This piece glimpses a version of me that even my friends wouldn’t be knowing.
A Glimpse Into The Background
Before IITK, life was simple in a strange way. I grew up in South Delhi, though my life was very different from what most people imagine when they hear that stereotype. My parents were extremely strict. Growing up, there were always rules: school trips, hanging out with friends were rarest of the rare, and going anywhere without a detailed explanation was impossible. I didn’t even know what having normal male friendships looked like because I had never experienced it. Looking back, I understand that my parents were only trying to protect me, but at that age, it felt like standing behind a glass wall watching everyone else experience normal life. Sports was another thing I loved but never got enough opportunities to pursue seriously, as my school was never particularly encouraging towards sports, especially for girls. Academics always came first.
Long before I reached IIT Kanpur, I had already built an entire version of my college life inside my head to compensate. I wanted to do everything that I couldn’t do before. I wanted to explore, travel, make mistakes, participate in random activities, and discover who I was when nobody was constantly telling me who I should be. Truly understanding myself and finding out the real me as since my childhood I was just like a clay being moulded by societal and parental expectations of being “perfect” and “ideal” and that was not me!
Most importantly, I wanted to leave college without regrets, becoming someone who could look back and say, “I lived every bit of the life I was given.”
A Happening Beginning
When I entered IIT Kanpur, I genuinely believed that was exactly what was going to happen. The first semester felt like proof. I don’t think I have ever explored anything in my life with the same enthusiasm with which I explored IITK. For the first time, I felt like I had been given a world with no boundaries. Everywhere I looked there was something new to try, and every club seemed interesting. I signed up for almost everything: DebSoc, HSS, ELS, Fine Arts Club, Dramatics, ICG, DNA, Ritambara. I wasn’t thinking about building a profile; I was simply excited to finally experience everything I had imagined for years, hanging out with friends, late night out and having fun.
And then there was sports. Sports had always been my passion, so I threw myself into volleyball trials, lawn tennis, and athletics. Inferno practice sessions and that competitive spirit despite injuries and tiredness consumed my days. Looking back, academics had quietly moved to the bottom of my priority list. I just assumed they would somehow work out, studying exactly as much as I thought was necessary and spending the rest of my time trying to experience and live college.
The Downfall and the Realizations That Followed
Unfortunately, IITK had other plans, and the semester ended with three F grades and a CPI of 2.4. Even today, writing that number feels strange that how the f*** I ended up like that. I had always been a consistent student, and if someone had told school-going Tanya that she would end her first semester with three fakke, she would have never believed that. Yet there I was. The grades themselves were difficult, but what made that phase harder was everything else happening alongside them. My health deteriorated significantly, leading to getting admitted in the Health Centre. Physically and mentally, I was exhausted, trying to understand an emotional and self-doubting version of myself that I had never met before.
Crying and self-doubt were never my things no matter what the situation came about, that was just not me, but something about IITK changed that. For the first time, a bad day would stay with me longer than it should have, and a disappointment would sit in my head for weeks. I kept waiting for the old, confident version of myself to return, but she never really did and I found myself in the middle of an identity crisis. Somewhere in the middle of this chaos, I also learned some difficult lessons about friendships. I have always been someone who overdelivers for people I care about, but the first year made me realize that not everyone sees friendships the same way. Some people stayed, some disappeared, and while it hurt, it taught me that protecting yourself with boundaries is not selfish.
Around that time, an event occurred in my personal life that changed many things. It quietly became the center around which much of my college life started revolving, changing the way I thought, made decisions, and viewed myself. Most people around me never realized how much influence it had because from the outside, everything looked normal. Classes, sports, and college continued, but internally, I had begun carrying a version of myself that was very different from the girl who had arrived at IIT Kanpur just a few months earlier.
The Athletics Journey
When the second semester began, I was still trying to recover from everything the first semester had left behind. The fakke, the low CPI, the health issues, and the self-doubt had made themselves comfortable inside my head. On the surface, life looked normal, but internally I was struggling. Then I entered sports in my life and I was to choose between Volleyball and Athletics as my sporting activity. Somewhere in the middle of that confusion, I finally chose athletics. It is one decision from my IITK life that I can confidently say I will never regret. Athletics became home in a way I had never expected. People often talk about the culture of IITK clubs and teams, but athletics was where I experienced that culture most deeply. The seniors were encouraging, the juniors became friends, and the alumni remained deeply connected. For someone who had spent her school life wanting sports opportunities, being surrounded by people who loved the track felt special.
When I joined athletics, I wasn’t really competing against others. I was competing against my own limitations. Most people around me had years of training behind them. They already had the conditioning, the strength, and the athletic foundation required to focus on performance. I didn’t. So while many people were working on improving timings and performance metrics, I spent a huge amount of time simply trying to prepare my body for the level of training that was required. My battle was often less about performance and more about endurance. Less about excelling and more about becoming capable enough to stay in the race.
Soon the second semester became summer camp, which led into the third semester and eventually winter camp. Athletics now occupied a massive part of my identity as well as my time. I still remember how badly I wanted that Inter IIT jersey and being a part of the Institute Athletics Team for Inter IIT. Anyone who has ever prepared seriously for a sports team will understand what I mean. There comes a point where the jersey stops being just a jersey. It becomes a symbol of all the effort that nobody sees. The early mornings. The injuries. The exhaustion. The practices when you don’t feel like showing up but show up anyway. And I couldn’t get it. Even today I feel sad when I think about that not because I believed I deserved it but because I knew how much I had invested emotionally and physically in that dream.
The difficult part was that athletics wasn’t the only thing weighing on me. My academic situation still needed desperate attention, and my personal life was going through its own complications. By January 2024, I knew I could no longer afford the level of commitment required for Inter IIT preparation if I wanted to fix the rest of my life. A lot of people told me, “Manage ho jaata hai,” but they only saw the visible parts of my life. They didn’t see the internal emotional exhaustion.
Eventually, after a lot of thinking, I chose to step away from regular sports practice. It wasn’t an easy decision. In fact, for a long time it felt like I was giving up a part of myself. Sports have always been one of the purest sources of happiness in my life. Walking away from it felt painful. What made that transition easier was the team itself. One thing I will always be grateful for is that athletics never stopped feeling like family. Even after I stopped regular practice, the team never treated me differently. The seniors remained supportive. The juniors remained welcoming. Nobody made me feel like I no longer belonged there. In fact, one of the most beautiful things about that team was that they never allowed your contribution to be measured solely by your presence on the track. And for someone who often struggled with feeling like I was falling behind in different aspects of life, that acceptance meant a lot.
The Survival Mode and the Placements
By this point, I was entering the middle of my college life facing a harsh reality: I had accumulated 2 new fakke while having cleared the previous 3. And honestly I never felt embarrassed or ashamed to admit that and instead focused entirely on clearing backlogs and fixing what could be fixed. While many people around me were planning for internship season with resume discussions and skill building, my third year felt like pure survival mode with juggling PORs. Ironically, I had plenty of experiences for a great resume, but I was not mentally present enough to capitalize on them. I convinced myself that because my CPI was low, opportunities were out of reach, and I didn’t even bother making a proper resume. It was only during placement season, when people looked at my resume and asked, “How did you not get an internship?” that I began understanding what I had missed. Not because opportunities were guaranteed. But because I hadn’t even given myself a fair chance.
And that realisation stayed with me. Because by then, placement season was approaching, and I knew I couldn’t afford to make the same mistake twice. My CPI had crossed the bar of 6, but targeting non-tech roles meant the shortlists would be few and far between. I didn’t panic about having zero interview shortlists on Day 1 or Day 2 because I knew I just needed to convert that one single opportunity when it would arrive. What I wasn’t ready for was how badly my first mock interview would go, barely fifteen hours before my actual interview. But I instantly sat with my friends throughout the night to rebuild my approach. In those hours, I had a major breakdown that I was not able to do. After coming out of that breakdown I realized that my biggest mistake was treating interviews like a viva exam. The person sitting across the table doesn’t just want answers. They want to know who you are. And for some reason, that thought changed everything. I remember repeatedly telling myself, “Tanya, interview dene nahi jaa rahi hai. Baat karne jaa rahi hai and unse conversation krni h. Unhe apne baare mein batana hai. Unhe yeh samjhana hai ki jo experiences tune collect kiye hain, unki value kya hai.”
The next morning on Day 3, I walked into the room carrying that exact mindset, simply trying to be myself. The conversation flowed naturally as I spoke openly about my experiences and
simply talked. The interviewer was so impressed that I became the first person to receive an offer just ten minutes after the second round. And tbh it felt so relieved having secured a job on the Day 3 with just one shortlist and 6 pointer CPI, and it was not easy!
Chasing Responsibilities
Ironically, around the same period during the 3rd year, opportunities that I was trying to avoid somehow kept finding me. There is one thing IITK taught me, it is that responsibility has a strange way of chasing you. Whenever I decided to focus entirely on academics and myself, another opportunity would appear.
The craziest example was PPOC. I still remember trying to avoid taking up responsibilities because I wanted to focus on repairing my academic situation. Meanwhile, opportunities seemed determined to ignore my plans. I eventually became Design Manager at PPOC. What started as design work slowly became something larger because the team genuinely appreciated my work. Around the same time, I was also approached for opportunities elsewhere, including Techkriti, but there simply weren’t enough hours in the day. Meanwhile, athletics remained a constant connection through Udghosh, where I worked as the Athletics Organiser, and I later joined the Inter IIT Sports Meet 2024 team as an Events Manager. While I couldn’t go for the Udghosh Core Team because again I had my placements which was far more important than anything else.
Looking at my experiences objectively, I realize I was constantly doing something, even though it was just to keep myself engaged that did not always add to my growth and I was there just for the sake of doing it!
Reflections at the Gates
When people ask me about my favorite memories from IITK, they usually expect stories about placements or PORs, but the memories that stay with me are much simpler. I remember the first-year outings with wingies and branchmates, randomly exploring campus, and saying yes to things without calculating the consequences. I miss that curious version of myself because the biggest regret I carry from IITK is not my CPI, or the fakke, or missing the Inter IIT team or the missed PORs. The biggest regret is that somewhere along the way, I slowly stopped living the life I had come here to live.
When I entered IIT Kanpur, I wanted freedom, growth, and stories, but gradually I became cautious, careful, and restrictive. The irony is that before IITK, I felt constrained because of my circumstances and strict upbringing, but inside IITK, I became constrained because of myself. No one else closed those doors; I did, perhaps because I was scared, tired, or realizing that growing up isn’t always a beautiful process.
I succeeded in securing a job but lost myself in these 4 years. I didn’t grow, I just survived and navigated the odds… Sometimes you achieve everything you were supposed to achieve and still feel like something is missing. That feeling stayed with me for a long time. And perhaps that is why this AWL took so long to write. Because I kept trying to decide whether my IITK story was a success story or not. Today, I think I finally have an answer. It was a human story. Nothing more or nothing less. It had failures, achievements, friendships, heartbreaks, it had dreams that didn’t come true and blessings I never expected. And maybe that is enough.
To My People
Before I leave, there are some people without whom this journey would have looked very different.
Riddhima and Vanshika, my roommates, have seen versions of me that most people never will. They listened to the endless overthinking, the confusion, the self-doubt, the excitement, the breakdowns, and everything in between without ever making me feel like I was too much. They celebrated my wins when I couldn’t appreciate them myself and stood beside me during phases when I couldn’t see a way forward.
My amma Bhavya Paturi deserves an entire section of her own. She was the senior every junior hoped to find. Warm, caring, patient, and always available whenever life felt overwhelming. Whether it was academics, personal confusion, sports, or random life crises, she somehow always knew how to make things feel manageable.
To my branchmates, Sameer, Priyanka, Ashutosh, Mayank, thank you for making the journey easier than it could have been. We may not have spent every waking hour together, but you were always there whenever help was needed, and sometimes that matters more than anything else.
To Kavita and Sunita, thank you for being my bakchodi partners, my random-plan partners, and some of the most fun people I met during my time here.
To Hitesh, thank you for making the hostel feel like home. There is something deeply comforting about food made with care, especially during phases when everything else feels uncertain.
And finally, to my Athletics family. I may not have gotten the Inter IIT jersey. I may not have stayed on the ground as long as I once hoped. But athletics gave me something much more valuable… it gave me the people I will always cherish.
As I sit here writing this, I still don’t know whether IIT Kanpur changed me for better or worse. The girl who entered believed that freedom comes from escaping restrictions, while the girl who is leaving knows that freedom is also about not becoming your own restriction. I didn’t become the exact person I wanted to become, but between the athletics ground, the hall corridors, the placement interview, and the late-night conversations, I found pieces of myself that I didn’t know existed.
And perhaps that is what these four years were really about.
Goodbye, IIT Kanpur.
You were not the story I imagined when I first arrived, but you became a story I will carry with me for the rest of my life.
Written by: Tanya Kushwaha
Edited by: Kashish Varshney, Saurya Singh
