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In this 30th edition of As We Leave 2024, Ishita Vyavahare, a Y20 student in the Department of Physics, takes us through a wild ride that was her college life and then tops it off with a bunch of sage advice that you can keep with you.
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 wasn’t going to write an AWL until some of them came out and I realised that I had a duty to write something that told my story. Truth be told, I don’t think I can summarize my college experience in a neat 2000 words all wrapped up with a bow tie. Even if someone held a gun to my head and asked me to, I would write different versions of it depending on what time of the month it was. I don’t think I can recall everything I did in college will leave that up to the older Ishita whenever she goes into nostalgia mode. I like to think that every event changes us, reinforcing and dismantling the beliefs we have, so, every instance of college is now distilled into what (anti)lessons I have learnt.
I did everything college had to offer. I religiously studied to get an A*, I slacked off to the extent that I didn’t know the name of the course till midsem, I bawled my eyes out when I couldn’t get an intern and had to stay for the summer and I smiled for days on end after having climbed the highest points in the campus, I dyed my hair pink and filled notebooks trying to feel better, I added nearly 1500 songs to my Spotify library in 4 years and I made a girlfriend family amidst self-doubts and isolation I felt after the falling out of my friend groups. I had a complete character arc in a movie that I thought to be a tragedy but was actually a coming-of-age.
Me? I came in a frigid and insecure little girl, fresh outta the rat race constantly wanting to make a name for herself and simultaneously blend into the new ass-kicking machine that was this college. My first year saw me being oblivious to academic sensibility. No matter how much I tried to study the courses, I found myself scoring no more than average. It wasn’t until the midsemester exams that I realised that iss college me koi doodh ka dhula nahi hai. Answers ke behti ganga me mere haath paav aur muh, sab dhul gaye. Make no mistake, I came to IIT Kanpur with dreams of being an academic weapon and graduate an accomplished scientist, but somehow no matter how much I tried, any effort to make meaning of anything was blotted out by the endless waves of the lockdown. Each day felt like just like any other seeing the same four walls of my room and being chronically online obsessing over pop artists and existential writers. Some things helped. I made some like-minded friends from college who to this day are with me and by me. Online clubs were actually an excuse for zoom calls of a bygone IITK practice known as “bulla sessions”. I got neck deep into yoga (excuse the pun) and the six dog walks a day were an excuse to see daylight. This is definitely an oversimplified and reductionist telling of my first year but the essence was just this. Numb days with virtually (killing it with these puns) four real faces to see; one of which was my dog, the rest three are with me in a whatsapp group called “genetically related peepl”.
In the first half of the second year, things started turning heating up and sides were getting polarized. People anticipated, aspired and assured themselves for campus to reopen its gates as the rest of the nation did. I remember the endless streams of memes, confessions, chat spamming that pushed the college authority to resume their normal mode. It was a fateful PHY101 online class where the professor gave us the unintended disclosure that the college will open sooner than later. I am the believer types and the prospect of seeing college made me excited. The rest is history.
Seeing all my friends and this batch of 1200 faces was a little bittersweet. You see, the internet puts you in an echo chamber of people like you, who use the same slang as you, who listen to your cool-deep-meaning-but-chill-rock-rap-beats kinda music, who are politically and socially pretty much homogenous. I realised in campus the sheer enormity of the type of friend groups, course choices, club and council choices, conversation choices, dressing sense choices, food choices, sleep schedule choices, humor types, attachment styles, priorities, backgrounds and chai preferences. This was a simulation of the real world. So many people turned out to be vastly different in appearance and demeanor than their online selves. Coupled with this was the huge break that Sincere Studying™ had taken in my life. You know? The kinds where you enter a flow state and can’t stop? Anyways, I questioned if my career-choice and the life I had envision is still what I wanted. I fucked around and tried to find out. Fourth semester went by in the blink of an eye and it brought even more questions and a truckload of self-doubts. I honestly became morose in college, I yearned to learn something but I couldn’t figure out what I wanted and was constantly overwhelmed. I went back home for the summer and decided to truly start Sincerely Studying™. I took on the POR of my dreams (ELS coordinator) I also changed how I looked, dispelled with the things that made me hate myself and came back for my third year feeling fresher than ever. For the lack of a better term, I had a glow up.
Third year saw me scrambling to have the research intern of my choice and struggling to keep up, yetgoddaminitagain to understand my courses, feeling more and more socially inept and unable to do justice to the POR I had. Most of my friend groups had fragmented around then and even my one-on-one friendships were going through their own separate agnipariksha. Campus chipped into my armor one strike and one day at a time, my glow up felt superficial. I won’t lie, I had become familiar with this sinking feeling and almost found a sort of comfort in it. There was plenty of gen z humor and art that made me feel heard so I spent a year in this feeling. I questioned more than ever what I wanted to do with my life. The vision of me being a scientist was dwindling and I found myself drawn to fashion, music and politics because for once, something felt relevant to my life. I stayed the following summer, did courses strategically and introspected. A lyric stuck with me that spoke my language of pessimism but was at the same time, empowering, “God loves you, but not enough to save you. “I took the decision to sit in the coming placement season with a vengeance. This placement season was going to be my bitch.
Enter seventh semester. Now more than ever, I Sincerely Studied™ for tests. I also reconciled with friends and talked things out. I still had to shed off the traces of self-doubt but going in, but had I learnt to let go. I had anxious breakdowns but they waxed and waned. I think here is the time I had an attitude glow-up. I embraced happiness as a necessary part of anything instead of sitting in my pit of sorrow and took it one day at a time. Come December of 2023 and I bagged my first job with my first interview. I never held myself in high regard but that moment was precious and life-shaping. I felt happy plain and simple.
The last semester was a spa session with my girls and herbal therapy all the way. I went on my first and last college trip. I was the chilliest, most easygoing I had ever been. I still probe that the question, “what is it that I want to do with my life?” to this day and I have made some headway. This was the closure I got from college. This place has shaped me but did not define me. I had, in my own right, had undergone a process of confrontational self-discovery and this ass kicking machine has made my glutes very resilient. You can end reading this AWL here and I suggest you do. Come back another day and maybe look at the rest of this piece with a clean palette.
Here are a list of the lessons and anti-lessons that I learnt along the way. They are mostly one liners so make of them what you will.
- Your mental health comes first. Period.
- Talk to everyone. Talk to whom you think is a loser, talk to the canteen wale bhaiya, talk to your crush, talk to professors and talk to the floor wali-didi/bhaiya, PhDs and Master’s students, talk to the smartest person you know and there will be no one you won’t be able to relate to.
- Scientific rules are written in stone but social rules are not. One size does not fit all.
- Learn to be kind but also be a proud hater. Don’t let people get away with being dicks.
- People are hypocrites and that’s okay, this is just the duality of humans. Learn to forgive.
- People can move, inspire, and awaken you. Allow them to teach you things.
- Frankness with your closest ones might feel harsh and uncomfortable but is what keeps bonds from ever breaking.
- Hall 4’s cold coffee + ice cream can mend a broken heart, can show light to a lost soul and has magical healing powers.
- Hall 4’s hot coffee can warm a toughened demeanor, can relax the gluteus maximus and has magical healing powers.
- Stay above the academic “poverty line” and do atleast the bare minimum.
- College is a mini-world and if you cannot find your niche, know that you can make it.
- Go to the top of diamond jubilee building at 2 am to experience elation, bonus points if it is winter.
- It’s true that some people are inherently smarter, but living a fulfilling life and success (whatever that may mean to you) has nothing to do with IQ.
- College events (GC and the like) are made foul with unethical politics. Do not be part of it. Focus on raising the bar when you participate.
- Don’t believe everything that seniors tell you. They tell you what was but not what is or can be.
- Organize your room for god’s sake.
- It is very very very very thrilling to spray paint walls. Make this space your own.
- Its easy to forget how much you grow in a span of as much as a semester. Do a personal ritual like write a letter to your semester old self.
- Not getting uninterrupted sleep at the same time everyday can fuck you up one day at a time.
- Do your laundry regularly or you will pay (for more underwear).
- Do your laundry to regulate your mental health. Fresh clothes help more than you think.
- Do your laundry with good music and a small dance.
- Stay away from the gossiping that pretends to take a moral high ground. Gossip as long as it does not harm anyone.
- Work on cultivating a high EQ. Empathy and connection is a recipe for contentment.
- Be cringy but don’t be fake.
- Fake it till you make it.
- Be the highest in the room only if you know you can safely go back to your room, assisted or unassisted.
- Life is too short, dress slutty. (applies to the boys too)
- Smoke up and listen to the song “Comatose” by Low Hum, alone.
- If you’re in physics, may the odds be in your favor.
- There is no scoreboard for the achievements that people have. There is no linear path. Don’t compare.
- But that does not mean that you should not compete. Crabs in a bucket will pull. You go ahead and push others.
- You are never behind in life. You are exactly where you are meant to be. Start from today.
- Visit every corner of the campus and know its lore.
- You may think productivity, social status, PORs or placement pay are divine things. While these things have an important place and you should pursue them, don’t worship this altar.
- You are more than the sum of your parts. You are not just skill and material but also potential for the future and attachment to the ones around you.
- Aim to think more clearly rather than deeply.
- The key to not losing your seat in the library during endsems is having a spare cycle lock and locking the chair handle and table leg.
- Guard your friend’s chair sure, but don’t defend it with your life. Its just a chair. They can keep rotating.
- NCL is a nicer place to study.
- Take PORs and manage your academics. College is a time to be ambitious not cautious.
- Sci-fi movie OSTs are some of the best productivity boosters.
- Not my quote but I read somewhere, “Sleep more than you study, study more than you party and party as much as you possibly can.”
- Please please please don’t be caught only amongst your wingies and become, dare I say, an incel. Women are perfectly friendly human-like humans.
- BSBE ka paani is the best paani don’t even argue with me.
Written by: Ishita Vyavhare
Edited by: Manya Dixit, Pranav Agrawal
Designed by: Sanyam Shivhare
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