Aryan Pandeya, a graduate of Y19 Mechanical Engineering Department, pens this piece reflecting on his transformative journey at IITK. It encapsulates his realisation of his challenges and how IITK prepares individuals to conquer great accomplishments in 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.
I had never been on overnight school trips, never had a night stay and almost always was raised in a protected environment in a gated society in the comforts of my hometown. My father, since my childhood had emphasized on the importance of living on one’s own in a hostel away from home to get a refresher on how the real-world works, and how one needs to conduct themselves to make the most of their time. As I graduate, I really must thank my dad for pushing me into this experience.
When my parents went back after my first day of orientation, I walked a long road back to my Hall 13 room with tears flowing down my cheeks. I wasn’t particularly sad, hurt, or disappointed, I was just not prepared for what was coming my way and was for the first time in uncharted territory. This was the first time I was going to live away from family, in a place I had no prior exposure to and no local family to fall back to. My younger brother sent me the link to 2 States (which has long been one of my favorite movies) to remind me of how I should make the most of my college life now. But what was college life for me when I started my journey?
It was tough.
If you’ve never learnt how to swim, once you’re thrown into the violent waters – your fight or flight responses start to kick in. And while the Bollywood fanboy inside me had this surreal ambition of leaving a mark on this place with every bit of my filmy personality, I realized that showering each morning and turning up to classes wearing a pair of fancy jeans wasn’t going to cut it. This place is brutal. The first year is a complete upheaval of whatever your definition of ‘normal routine’ is, and there is no comfort other than what your huge ego might supplement once you step outside of the campus as an ‘IIT student’. Waking up each morning, having a shower(?), getting breakfast, actually attending each class, making notes, rushing for lunch back and then hurrying your way to whichever lab you’ve got due next, PE classes in the evening and then extra-curriculars in whatever time you’ve left. All of this seems like a checklist, and you probably will think that one can possibly get done with most (if not all) of these if they put their energy to it, but all the above is what is explicit. There is such a huge dynamic shift; that all of this comes with certain implied norms and notions – what you wear to classes, do you have breakfast alone in the morning or do you have friends alongside in the mess for each meal, are your grades slipping down – and are you really worth your JEE rank, what extra-curriculars are important, how many are important? Is being friends with the other sex a big deal? How do you make new friends? How relevant are you in your wing, do seniors know you? Are you liked?
No matter how much fun you have in the first week of orientation and how comforted you feel by your student guide and your wingies, once the semester starts, there is one truth that you’ll have to come to terms with – IIT doesn’t care. This institution does not care for who you are and who you were, and unless there is an iota of a chance of whatever you’re facing breaking out into the national media, the institute won’t give a flying fuck about you. You’ve got to wake up each morning and stick your feet to the ground and fight your way to carve your presence. No one is going to do it for you.
Picking your people on this campus is of paramount importance. While you lead a very structured life in terms of what courses and how many credits you need to take up and when internships and projects come up; what the people around you help with is more fundamental to how you respond to things that are not structured in life. People are unpredictable, spontaneous, and different, different from what you imagine yourself to be. This is why your peer group helps you deal with situations that you’ve never faced before; it molds you into someone who can be accommodating when needed, and equally rigid and stubborn when required. The people you surround yourself with on campus shape the kind of inter-personal relationships you have in life, and this is probably the most underrated takeaway from the IIT experience. And to remind the first-year version of myself of this for the n-th time, GET OUT ARYAN, GET UNCOMFORTABLE, MAKE FRIENDS, MAKE MEMORIES.
I think towards the latter half of my time here, I felt like I was in a huge conundrum – was I still a kid or was I an adult? How do you feel about being someone who has classes to wake up to and homework to solve and at the same time, has the freedom to go out for trips, decides what career might suit them best and struggle for detergent for laundry each week. Adulting hits you out of nowhere towards the latter half of your time here, and navigating the sense of responsibility and ownership gets tricky. IITK however, is the slow part of adulting, and I really love(d) living out this slow part to my fullest. Be careful of your time here, this is the grey hazy segment between [having total control and all estimates of what you want] and [having zero idea of what might come up next and no precedent for what you might face].
Tangibly, my journey at this place was as conventional as it gets, and there probably isn’t anything that makes it stand apart. But that’s alright. It was a good time, I met good people and I graduate with a lot of good memories. I’m happy. It might be a tough pill to swallow, and probably took me close to seven semesters to digest – you don’t have to compete with those around you. You’re here to find your calling and make your presence. And even if you don’t solve these two things, you have a journey that’s yours. Reading blogs by seniors and being surrounded by friends who were achieving everything under the sun might give you an initial benchmark of what you’d like to set out for in terms of your professional career, but this amazing advice I received from an alum that graduated a decade ago was that one is not bound by what has already been accomplished by seniors and friends at IIT, you’re very well capable of being more, and should look around to know whatever has been done earlier, can very well be done again, but you, you’re worth pulling off bigger heists than you know of.
I struggle with searching for validation for practically everything I pursue, and it’s one of the things that has often crippled my social and personal life, but when I finally left campus, I realized that the time I spent here was MINE. It belonged to me, and I lived it the way I wanted. As I leave, I take with myself a long list of friends that I can invite to my wedding, and hopefully a lot of weddings that I get invited to. I learnt about people, and I also spent time alone. I achieved more than I thought I could, and I failed at so much of what I thought I was capable of. I know the people I met here and the time I spent on this campus is going to always be my most cherished memory, but I’m confident of moving onto better things. Life’s going to get better, and I hope everyone reading this takes away at least this one learning I had from my time here – Kehte hain, agar kisi cheez ko dil se chaho… toh puri kainaat use tumse milane ki koshish mein lag jaati hai. Your life peaks when you want it to, you’ve gone through a lot, you might as well believe for a little more for it to get better.
Thanks everyone, that was my time.
Written by – Aryan Pandeya
A charming little homage to Pandeya, our former chief editor at Vox Populi. Thank you for guiding Vox, at times becoming our light, and sharing those amazing moments and memories. We have all learned a lot from you and your work, which we will treasure for the rest of our lives. Even an unlimited number of thank you notes will not be enough to express our gratitude for the experiences we have all enjoyed with you. We wish you love and success.
(adding colours coz – if you know, you know!)
Edited by – Mayur Agrawal, Gauravi Chandak
Designed by – Mrunmay
