Pratyush Ranjan is a graduating Y19 student from the Department of Mechanical Engineering. In the nineteenth edition of As We Leave, Pratyush reminisces his time well-spent at IITK and how the many opportunities and struggles here have reshaped his outlook on life.
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. Please don’t run a plag detector here!!
Chapter 1: Agar dilon mei apni betabiyan lekar chal rahe ho toh….. Zinda ho tum!
As far as I can remember, when I first came to IITK, nights were peaceful, and days were content, and I was just living my utopia of IIT. (Things Changed!) I had read Five Point Someone, where the Author expresses his IITD story, just after JEE, and my expectations from IITK were somewhat similar. However, things turned out pretty different from the beginning itself.
I entered IITK in the Civil Department but realised that I really needed to change it, and I found myself in the Mechanical Dept the very next year. (The gradient descent of my life again reached a suboptimal extrema xD).
The first year was hard for me. I believe that I am someone who takes a lot of time to learn new things, and that’s why I feel like I learned IITK the hard way. Initially, It was difficult for me to get accustomed to knowing that tutorial classes needed to be separate from lecture classes, one should learn to clear their queries from Piazza itself, and one need not do the complete Griffiths for PHY103.
Prioritising acads (Grammarly is correcting it to “acid”, lol) is a good thing to do. However, I managed to do it in the wrong way, and I was not doing anything else. Me and Harshit (roomie) used to spend the better part of our day in CC and sort of always leave it at 1:40 am sharp. And raced towards Hall-13 Canteen to compensate and reward ourselves with ice cream, be it summer or the chilling winters of January. While entering the wing, I sort of always imagined what all had happened in my wing (FOMO).
Honestly speaking, I was carrying regrets with me after the first semester. The reality is that even if you want to get a good grade, there is an ample amount of time to do something else here. You just have to make slight adjustments with your timings of sleep, bulla, and acads. And I believe that this is one of the things this institute teaches you really well. In my first year, I got a somewhat good SPI, but I got an even better SPI later on when I studied significantly less and did multiple other things.
In my second semester, I tried to be more inclusive of events happening around me, but somehow my mean position remained acads. I used to be surrounded by people who didn’t want to be doing anything else except acads. And my admiration for them inspired me to be like them. I think this is the beauty of being immature; you first assimilate from the people around you and then keep the best of their qualities. Everybody I met here taught me something, and I am a composition of all those things.
A peculiar thing happened to me when I woke up very late one Saturday and found out that I have crossed the threshold of classes required to fail NCC. I started believing in god with much greater enthusiasm when I got to know that somebody had mistakenly marked my attendance. If I would have failed it, I had to deal with the most fearful things about IITK – Doing PE again with freshers and throwing the idea of BC into the bin.
Still, after all this, I miss those days (every Y19 does). The first year is when you set the trajectory of your life at IITK. It’s that point where you are framing and contrasting your version of how IITK should be for you and what IITK has to offer to you. It’s special because you are still naive.
When prompted, “What would you have done differently?” a simple no can’t be an answer to it. Everybody has some regrets and a different way of re-living the good old days. I probably would have filled nominations for senator elections or something like that if I knew how many cascading effects it could have later on.
The first year was tough but vivid at the same time. I felt like IITK’s culture was trying to embrace me with open hands, but I was the one who didn’t push through. I am looking up photos from my phone to write this AWL and feeling emotional at the same time.
Chapter 2: Zindagi ne zindagi bhar gam diye! Jitne bhi Mausam diye sab namm diye
I went home for mid-sem break for a full grandeur of 20 months. Initially, everyone was trying to maintain contact with Wingies and friends, but then things faded. Personally, I would say that this break served me well, at least for the first 6 months. This forced solitude sort of healed the mental bruises I had gotten during the first year. However, I don’t know if it will work for any of you.
Like every other second year with good internet, I also started bulking up courses on Coursera about Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Super Deep Learning (JK) etc. I felt like I was in an imaginary race about who could do the maximum number of courses among my peers. The good thing about that time was that nobody knew when the college would call us back, and I think that’s why people kept going on.
Whatsapp Groups, Discord Servers, Zoom Calls, and unstable internet are a risky combination to have. I used to be very tensed about the deadlines of exams on Mookit and the penalty of late submission, but a piece of advice from one of my prof really changed my perspective, and I quote:
“Try to overcome your nervousness. If you get nervous about something as insignificant as a quiz, what will you do if, ten years later you are the person in charge of the next mission to Mars? Think about it, and prepare yourself that way.”
There was a time when I accepted that I was not returning to the campus soon and I needed to build upon myself with whatever I had. Finally, a good thing happened to me: I was accepted under GSoC at the end of my 2nd year. Obviously, I worked hard to get it, but this is a story about the deeper implied meanings of my journey at IITK, so I am skipping all the nitty-gritty.
Chapter 3: Mann ka hua toh acha…nahi toh aur bhi acha
The third year started with the internship season, which also took place in the online mode. I was rewarded appropriately for my procrastination of not doing CP in the summers by merely getting shortlisted. I covered courses of TBBT, Suits, Silicon Valley, etc, in the summers but left DSA for later. Somehow I slogged through the time and prepared DSA and got one internship in September from SPO, but it was a hell of a tough time. You might have realised by now that most of my learning was due diligence of deadlines. And I think this is probably true for most of my friends. You don’t revise first and then apply for a job; you apply for jobs first and then start revising.
We returned to IITK at the beginning of the 6th semester, and I got welcomed with COVID for the first time. After a sweet 15 days on campus, I left for home, afraid for my immunity and came back after midsems. Mech template is so flexible that I needed to drop one of my DC (ME354) for the last sem to do courses like ESO207 and MTH535 first. I didn’t know at that time that I would have to do this DC later on under one of the most infamous profs of Mech Dept. But somehow, delaying doing this DC was intertwined with one of the most beautiful experiences for me at IITK (heartbreak).
Our wing C6 became the epicentre of completing assignments and quizzes among the Mech Dept. There used to be a room filled with 15 people with their Laptops in Hall 13 where everybody used to source code for completing the lab solutions of ME351 like a trading floor.
Chapter 4: Pehle! Kyu na mile hum…
This is the most interesting and wholesome year in, I think, everyone’s life. The way you spend your both semesters are in absolute contrast to each other.
Placements were coming, and like everybody else, I started Leet-coding, resume building, and whatnot. I knew from the beginning that this semester I would be very busy with all sorts of things, so I intentionally picked up more & harder electives so that it became an absolute necessity for me to manage my time properly. This worked.
“30 November – 1 December”
I religiously believe that every guy/girl in IIT remembers this day with very high regard. I do, too. Honestly speaking, the amount of fear/ nervousness you would feel on 30th November would be just opposite to that you do on 1st December. Believe me.
I, being a great procrastinator, was running around the Kanpur Markets for shoes, file folders, a suit, etc., on 30th Nov with my heart racing thinking about everything I had mentioned in my resume and not even looked at for a month. I talked to one of my seniors (Y17), and he strongly advised me to focus more on the HR/Situation based questions. You know, experience is a very beneficial thing to have when you have seen it work wonders. When I entered Hall-12 for my first interview at midnight, I suddenly became so calm and relaxed seeing everybody in suits. I felt like I have finally grown. It’s difficult to describe it with words here.
Got placed! Felt peace! Moved on!
The happiness you feel for your placement is as momentarily as the above sentence. However, there is an eternal sense of deep content. Maybe that’s what actual happiness is.
Things became quite interesting the next semester. One thing for which I will always remain grateful for IITK is that most of my courses didn’t have any attendance criteria. And not going to classes was a constant for me from the beginning. I only used to attend classes for my electives; otherwise, my profs would have honoured me with C’s and D’s. I literally had one DE in which only 2 students were writing the end-semester exam, so the prof used to notice the attendance quite well.
(sudo rm -rf doubts)
Over these years, I grew quite confident as well as spiritual, and I literally didn’t care about what anybody thought of me. Mostly this worked out great for me. As I see it, it’s about accepting your inner conscience about who you are, where you have come from, and surrounding yourself with people who elevate you.
“3rd year waalo! Apna zor laga dena Hall1 lene mein”
I absolutely cherish the days I spent in Hall 1. My friends are a witness to this: I used to say all the time that Hall 1 and MT are the two places where the soul of IITK resides. A walk to MT was the first thing I used to do after waking up, obviously for chai. Since I had taken the bare minimum courses to complete my graduation credits, it was important for me to pass all of them. One of my friends and I had ME352 midsem the next day at 8 AM. We soon realised there was a lot to cover, but it can be done in a day. To celebrate this, we started partying at 3 in the afternoon, and the hangover lasted till the night. (Somehow, we did well the next day xD).
There is hardly any rooftop in IITK we didn’t go upon. Spending countless nights partying, dancing, and whatnot, randomly exploring streets of Kanpur, sneaking past SIS guards for L-12 roof (spectacular sunset), riding in campus playing songs on E-rickshaw at full volume, chai at DOAA canteen at 5 am, utilising Insta live archive to save our bulla videos; I am glad to say that we did it all. Thank you, IITK, for this.
Written By: Pratyush Ranjan
Edited By: Rudransh Goel, Aditi Khandelia
