As we leave…#29

Promit Chakroborty is a final year undergraduate in the Civil Department. Let’s have a look at his journey at IIT Kanpur and live the nostalgia and reminiscence with him.

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. 

We’re Gonna Carry This Weight

As we (hope to) leave this place that I’ve called home for nearly twenty-two years now, the desire for hindsight hits hard. So does the existential dread, but I can’t tell if that is at the idea of leaving home, or at the thought of staying here longer.

I’ve been brought up on this campus, and academic life is mostly what I’ve seen around me. Yet, it would be a mistake to say that I was prepared for life as a student here (or even knew what I was getting myself into). I did have some things easy, my unique position (as a student and a faculty kid) allowing me to often view both sides of the coin, informing my decisions and making them better. But college life is hard for everyone. We are suddenly dropped into a system that runs at a breakneck pace, herded into a group with thousand-odd strangers that we don’t fit in with. A lot of our quirks, overlooked in the shelter of our home, just do not fly in this mini-society. And a lot of our habits are not conducive to extracting the most joy and wisdom out of our time here. As a freshman, back in 2016, I was a kid with an (early) bedtime and an over-inflated sense of maturity. A lot has changed since then. I mean, all of last week I slept around 5 am.

Despite the challenges this place has presented, I’ve had a fantastic time here. It has been a real character-building journey, through all the laughs, lividness, successes, and self-doubts. And so, I present here my personal journey, in the form of my observations. The observations are in the second person because some character traits you just have to live with. (Did I mention an over-inflated sense of maturity?)

Give fresh air a chance.

Oh, I cannot overstate the importance this simple lesson has played for me. I really cannot. With such a busy academic schedule, it’s easy to get caught up in your head and isolate yourself. And having many non-academic interests, I often made it worse for myself. Hours spent fretting over course grades, agonizing over personal decisions, and troubleshooting club issues; the solution was always the same. Unlock my door, go for a walk, perhaps drop in on a friend and share a joke. It’s incredible how easily a change of pace lets me shift gears and re-focus. It especially helped me in my third year, when every day felt like a death sentence. I must have made my way up and down Hall 12’s wings a million times during that period. But then 4 quizzes a week, club coordinator duties, and trying to land a research internship on negligible prior experience will do that to you.

I did manage to land an internship, though, and the following summer, I was off to Texas to try my hand at a topic that I knew was way above my competence level. So I did what I could, and watched a lot of Netflix to get over my frustration at my unproductiveness. But those two months reinforced for me another lesson.

It’s not always about the textbooks.

I’m not going to lie, I had high hopes for that internship. Before it, I had spent a few weeks at IIT Kgp working on an engaging research problem that I also made progress on in that little window of time. And I had taken up a project in my 6th semester, which seemed to be progressing smoothly despite some initial setbacks. Not to mention, I knew people who had published papers off the back of summer internships like mine, in their first year even. So when I was reduced to a glorified human spell-checker-for-equations (well paid though), I couldn’t help but feel that I had screwed up somewhere. Yet I didn’t regret the way I spent my summer. I diverted my attention to non-academic pursuits: exploring the country, making friends, filling myself with invaluable experiences, and having a kick-ass 21st birthday with my cousins in DC. And that was okay. I wasn’t irresponsible about what I went there to do – I still put in my 40-hour weeks – but I simply reasoned that anything can lead to growth. (This realization did not come innately, of course. I have my parents to thank; it’s just one of the perks of having a prof for a dad and a counselor for a mom. I did admit I have things easier than many.)

The concept was not new to me. Every semester I tried to strike some balance between academics and other stuff. Which, I suppose, brings me to the age-old adage.

All work and no play, and all that jazz.

Though I’ve often seen it around me, I personally have never been able to spend all my time on coursework without taking time out of my week to do something else too. (And no research projects don’t count.) And in this aspect as well, IITK has given me options in spades. From participating in MEs to organizing quizzes to sitting in literary discussions, I have never felt like I didn’t have something to do while on campus. And that is not to mention the doors that high-speed internet opens up in streaming or downloading stuff. I must admit, there are too many options to exhaust, and I often teetered on the knife-edge of falling in too deep. I definitely ran the risk of forgetting what I was here to do in the first place – which was academics (again, responsibility is responsibility). But on the whole, I’m glad I took the time to explore, and I am the richer for it.

A similar mindset guided my choice of how to spend the summer of 2018. Where many of my batchmates pushed for academic work in the second-year summer as well, I instead went and worked for a newspaper (The Indian Express) for two months. It was everything I hoped it would be: a lovely experience, very different from the day-to-day of college life. And yet, I found that skills from each were applicable in the other. The grueling semester had already taught me how to meet an unrelenting onslaught of deadlines. Which came in handy in the newsroom, where for each article – from start to finish – I had only the few hours that I could cram in one day. On the other hand, working for a newspaper, I learned to ask questions unabashedly, which has definitely helped me since, both in research and in applying for internships and grad school. It just goes to show that often we are very constrained in our idea of what applies where. At least, I was. Going into the internship, I never expected it to have any relevance to what I did in college. But it turns out that a lot of what we do have far-reaching consequences, more than we can see in the moment.

And this neatly summarizes what college has left me with, I believe. More than teaching me academics and engineering, these four years have pounded at what I thought I knew and understood, picking out the holes in it with alarming efficiency. The memories that I have gained here seem to have an uncanny ability to pop into relevance when I least expect it. This has been true even in these four short years. I can only wait with nervous excitement for more such moments in the future when I will again look back at the period of ’16-’20 with respect for its “I told you so‘s”. Even with all the lessons, I fear I’m bound to repeat some mistakes I’ve already made (which imparted these lessons in the first place). But, as my first year taught me quite soundly, to adapt takes time. I got time.

I realize that in the course of this article, I haven’t talked much (or at all) about the role the academics itself has played in my time here. And that’s because, well, it really hasn’t caused any significant revelations. Everybody here learns something about their major, whether they want to or not. For me, I’ve known since school that I’m interested in mechanics. Studying civil engineering here has taught me a fair bit of mechanics, and I have genuinely enjoyed all of it. Even the courses I absolutely hated left me with some interesting concepts or the other. But for me, it’s the other things, the memories and the wisdom, that have been the real takeaways.

And that leaves us here, at the end. To all my friends, and to my home and alma mater, I say, “See you, someday, somewhere…“

Cue ‘The Real Folk Blues’

Written by:- Promit Chakroborty

Edited by:- Dhruv Chhabra and Hemant Kejriwal