Mr. Harshit Bisht is a dual degree program student in Mathematics and Statistics department from Y14 batch. Get a load of his amusing encounters at IITK.
“Life is an endless journey of discovering why you were an idiot 2 years ago” -original quote, afaik
For better or worse, I have spent a long time at IIT-Kanpur. Assuming the truth value of the quote, for now, I’ve finished two cycles of idiocy starting from my first year. Thus, I thought it best to grab this opportunity and prepare a time capsule of my present opinions, so we can all laugh at them collectively a few years down the line. It’ll be nice if some of you can relate to or find validation in what’s been said, reassuring you that even a stranger with different contexts has experienced the same. Invites for coffee/beer/butter chicken/rajma chawal together to dissect the ideas presented will be as welcome in the future as they are today.
If I’m honest, my first impression of life at IIT-Kanpur was disappointment. While the campus was beyond beautiful, the classes and clubs didn’t seem to attract me enough. I used to think it is something we should blame on the coaching institutes; telling tall tales (and often, outright lies) of the grandeur of IITs to manipulate young kids.
Lately, I feel what I had built up in my head wasn’t the institute, but my own self. It’s not as if I believe that every student here should attend all the classes and take an interest in their discipline, I’m just sharing an observation that there are many who aren’t attending classes and not doing much in dramatics, dance, entrepreneurship, or anything else either. I have never been too good for this institute or those MTH101 lectures (true for almost all of us), and I now feel deeply humbled and privileged to have been a part of the campus.
I know I speak of doom and gloom, but it’ll be an ABSOLUTE LIE to say my first year wasn’t a blast. For the first time, I experienced the sheer joy of freedom and physical security. My friends and I spent hours and days on end discussing local campus gossip, pulling all-nighters, and watching movies and TV shows. I remember several nighttime excursions attempted at mapping every inch of the campus on both foot and bicycle, often ending in being shooed away by SIS guards since we “weren’t allowed” wherever we were trying to go. Where else could I lie down on the road at 4 in the morning (inebriated or otherwise), with no fear for my physical safety apart from the pesky bugs.
The freedom also extended to the realm of social interactions. Most of us love the outspoken campus culture, although to be fair, I don’t think I’ll ever use swear words as frequently as that first year. The most novel part of the experience was sharing living quarters with SO MANY smart people who were interested in discussing how the world functioned and had plenty of time to do so (since they weren’t attending classes either 😛). Our poor training in rhetoric meant that these conversations often turned into heated encounters, but the fact that we could do so with little fear of physical confrontation meant I could articulate (and hence receive much-needed feedback on) opinions I wouldn’t express in other social settings. Of course, most of our opinions were pretty stupid then, but it didn’t matter since we learned how to civilly discuss and correct them.
During my second and third year, I tried to take on many responsibilities that seemed attractive to me. This also happened to be the lowest point of my stay on campus. I repeatedly had the experience of not accomplishing as much as I had planned. Unable to face my failure, I’d choose to avoid my friends/seniors/professors than owning up to my limitations and continuing to work towards what was still possible. I do not say this to underplay the experiences of those suffering from clinical mental health issues, but I cannot imagine feeling worse than I did then. If you feel like you’re failing someone’s expectations, give them a call right now. Trust me; you’d be surprised how much can be salvaged once you simply decide to show up.
An upside of avoiding work and procrastinating is how much desirable it makes everything else seem, and I ended up reading and learning from my friends a lot in this period. Something that always grinds my gears is this widely held belief that everyone’s story is unique and special to the point that you can never adequately narrate or understand someone else’s experience. Screw that 😛 and let gossip be your best friend. An advantage of tapping into campus lore are the stories you hear about what your contemporaries and certain campus “legends” did. I took these with a pinch of salt (obviously!) and tried to find and cite my sources when I could, but I owe a lot of my wisdom and experience to the people around me. Also, folklore and gossip become the perfect excuse to find comfort in the company of your closest friends.
Something amazing happened in 4th year, something that I hadn’t anticipated previously. I fell in love with mathematics. Sure, I’d made some half-hearted efforts towards my department previously, but this was fo’real REAL. Even if you have no plans to pursue what you’re learning in the classroom as a career (as of now, I don’t), appreciating the disciplines’ place in the grand scheme of things will make struggling with the material much easier, trust me. The biggest change it brought was how my relationship with all my instructors changed, finally being able to empathize with their choices and motivations in life.
I think I’ve learned most about everything I know in my 4th year. The courses were specialized enough, and my classmates experienced enough that classroom discussions were elevated beyond merely clarifying what was presented and went off on extremely informative tangents. Much more than that, Hall 1 comes abuzz with discussions between people from different hostels congregating over peanuts and banter. I learned about people’s internship and research experiences and was astounded by the broad spectrum of possibilities being explored by the batch as a whole. After a long while, the common perspective seemed more external than internal, with everybody wondering about research, industry, politics, personal finances, and the world outside campus in general.
I enrolled in the dual degree program since I didn’t know what I wanted to do during my 4th year. Honestly, I still don’t 😛 but the additional year in the campus has taught me to be comfortable about it. I read somewhere (or in other words, I have no sources for this) that professional mathematicians don’t always have better intuition about the extremely abstract objects they work with, they’re just better at operating and being productive in a state of imperfect understanding. I think that’s true of most things in life, and with the time you learn to keep pegging on even when you’re outside your comfort zone. People around me had very different experiences staying an extra year in campus: most of us experienced loneliness to some extent, but some were able to either improve their CV and/or skillset helping them start their careers better than they could have a year earlier. I would advise you to set tangible goals if you plan to stay on campus another year and be clear about how it will benefit you. This is not a decision to be made impulsively or in haste. I tried to learn some French along the way, although I’m not sure I did particularly well there.
One of the most memorable things I experienced was being on the other side of the classroom. I was the TA (unofficially a tutor) for a compulsory course in my department, and it felt unreal to take charge of a class full of students only three years junior to me. It felt rather hypocritical to handwave and bullshit my way through arguments when I wrote midsem exams and then in the evening pass judgment on others for doing the very same. It’s humbling to see people grasp the ideas so soon when you spent hours struggling with them. Something else that I learned during this experience was how I don’t need to be smarter or better than someone to have a meaningful contribution to their life. Even though many in that class were clearly more intelligent than me, things I had cobbled together from interacting with others were (hopefully, fingers crossed!) enough to teach them something. I also spent some time changing the departmental society STAMATICS according to my understanding of math.
When I look back on the years I spent at IIT Kanpur; I see neither a journey of going from strength to strength nor overcoming great adversity and hardships to reach where I am. I did whatever I could be bothered to, constantly being lazy and leaving room for improvement. I definitely made several mistakes (some of which I still regret). When you look back on your time spent in college, I hope you too see past a narrative of absolute triumphs or victimhood and observe that frankly, the campus always had your back. I skipped classes and quizzes, behaved regretfully, and was personally irresponsible on several occasions. I have no delusions that what saved me was the social capital, lack of judgment, and privilege that this campus gave me. I was allowed to make mistakes and learn in a safety net that covered more than I could have ever asked for.
As I leave, I’m sure what I’ll miss most is being with my friends in a sandbox with a shared mental space that allowed having ridiculous bets, gossiping endlessly, razing off each other’s hair and showing off our baldness, attempting exams drunk and high (not both yet!), and playing volleyball with an air balloon in the middle of the library during exam season.
Edited by: Ayush Agarwal
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