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In this 48th edition of As We Leave 2026, Naman Sethi, a Y22 from the department of Economics, shares an honest account of four years filled with friendships, competitions, leadership, and unexpected lessons. Blending humor with thoughtful observations, he explores how setbacks, luck, and the people around us shape our journeys far more than we often realize, leaving behind a heartfelt tribute to the place he was once unsure about calling home.
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.
The time for writing an AWL has come far too soon. First of all, thanks to Vedika for patiently putting up with my repeated requests for deadline extensions and delays. Writing this turned out to be far more difficult than I had imagined. I still feel as though I’m on a vacation and will be returning to campus in a few days. Going through old photos and revisiting memories has made me deeply grateful for the people I met and the life I got to live here. There are many parts of my IITK journey that I couldn’t fit into these pages, but I’ve tried to write about the experiences that shaped me the most without making this too long or boring.
So it begins
I came to IITK rather reluctantly.
I had never thought about coming here. I spent my final days at home regretting filling IITK ECO over another stream at IITB. Like many aspirants, I had romanticised it far too much already. I assumed things would work out exactly as I had imagined. Life has a way of humbling you. I flunked terribly below expectations in my final paper and landed a rank just good enough to take up Economics at IITK.
I was worried life at IITK would be boring. I hadn’t lived in this part of the country before, and the city of Kanpur wasn’t very reassuring at first glance. I remember arriving with the vague, sinking feeling that life here might be slow, uneventful, maybe even disappointing.
Within a week, I knew I was wrong.
IITK moves fast. Before you’ve properly unpacked, orientation consumes your days, wing introductions consume your nights, and suddenly your wingies become the default family you are left with, far away from home for the first time. Friend groups form overnight. Some disappear just as quickly. And before something begins to feel normal, something new comes up.
The first year was complete chaos. I played table tennis in inferno, participated in the freshers dance, and thanks to that I was pulled by my wing baapus into the galaxy dance. That was a difficult time. 20 days of honest hard work later we were placed last. A very IITK introduction to effort not necessarily translating into outcomes (more on this later). But at least all of us did good Bhangra after that, so, win win I guess.
That wouldn’t be the last disappointing competition result either. Over the next year, there would be Takneek mishaps, Inferno losses, and enough near misses to make me suspicious of my own crunch-time abilities..
I remember my IITK dada once describing his achievements, gold in Tech and Cult meets, gold in galaxy and takneek apart from solid acads. My profile looked on the opposite spectrum of his XD. I didn’t mind it though and often joked about it as well.
Nevertheless, the first year was a beautiful time. I met lots of people, started dating, found a core friend group that stayed with me till the very end, didn’t study nearly as much as I should have, and spent countless hours playing TT. More than anything though, I remember the wing—water dunk fights, random all-nighters, bullas, group studies, and entire evenings spent packed into the same room (E512 ftw) talking about absolutely nothing. Hall 13 was special that way.
At the end of the first year, I was chosen as a secretary at the Finance and Analytics Club and an assistant editor at Vox, although I did very little work in the latter.
FAC, Tech Meets and Hall 2
A month into hall 2 and there was a visible change in the environment. People were busier, as the realities of college life began to hit after the dreamlike 1st year. Ambitions began to come to the forefront. Some people were trying to recover from first-year CPI disasters before intern season eventually came knocking. Others were busy building profiles, getting deep into clubs, or trying to figure out what they wanted to do with their lives. There were still a lot of late night bulla and bakchodi sessions but they had reduced markedly.
I was getting more involved in FAC by then, while also trying to stay regular with table tennis. The TT team was already quite strong, and my own game wasn’t improving fast enough. Trying to manage everything became difficult, so it slowly took a backseat. I met a lot of wonderful friends and seniors through TT though, and had a lot of fun outings till my 4th year.
FAC became a huge part of my second and third year. I made friendships that lasted, had some parties, became an active consumer (and occasional distributor) of campus gossip, and did some actual work once in a while too. And yes parties, lots of them :D.
I was also chosen as a coordinator in my 3rd year. Being the coordinator, it was a lot of firefighting. No matter what we planned, something would inevitably go wrong at the worst possible time. Someone wouldn’t (or would) show up, some permission would get delayed, some event would suddenly become impossible to execute 12 hours before it started. It made me realize how important simply showing up regularly was.
I fell seriously ill for almost a month in September and had to miss a bunch of club activities. At the time, I felt terrible about it. Looking back, I think I cared far too much about what others thought of me. Most reputations are far less permanent than they feel at the moment.
Leadership makes that worse sometimes. Different people expect different things from the people they look up to, and it’s impossible to satisfy everyone. I slowly realized that trying too hard to fit into some ideal image of a coordinator was exhausting and mostly pointless anyway. What mattered more was whether the club continued functioning well as a collective, and whether the four of us were able to work together and keep things running.
I think we did a decent job at that. I feel really grateful to have the team of coordinators with me that I did.
FAC led me into a couple of Inter IIT Tech meets as well. Both times, the teams I was part of, put in loads of effort. It was hard and even grunt work lots of times. Both involved discovering horrible forward bias far later than we should have, surviving on almost no sleep, eating prison-grade Hall 2 mess food in December (which somehow manages to be even worse in winter), and spending entire days staring at a screen trying to produce results you aren’t even sure are mathematically possible.
The strange part about Tech Meet work is that you never really know where you stand. Since you have no idea how the other teams are doing, even good results never feel fully reassuring. And both times, the final outcome didn’t really go the way we had hoped. A fairly recurring theme across my IITK journey.
But nonetheless, there were important learnings to be taken. From the first one,I learnt a great deal from our PS lead Vishal. He set incredibly high leadership standards without ever making a show of it. Always there before us, usually leaving after us, and somehow never letting the pressure from seniors trickle down onto the second years. Quiet leadership, but honest.
The second time was harsher. I was one of the leads, the team was larger and it was a multi domained PS. Last minute confusions and mishaps meant we were late by a few seconds in the submission, a 25% penalty meant we were effectively out of the medal’s race.
I too was guilty of being fixated on squeezing out a little more accuracy instead of stepping back, staying calm, and trusting the work we had already done. By that point, none of us had slept properly in days, and you could almost feel everyone slowing down mentally. Calmness almost always leads to better results, stress never really helped me anywhere at IITK.
Ironically, my favourite part of Tech Meets was everything that came after the final presentations. New campuses, new cities, random trips, and finally getting back the freedom we had temporarily given up for the competition.
The unsaid costs of ambition
On Day 1 of intern season 2024, I let an offer slip through my hands, partly through a lapse at the final step, partly through bad luck.It was the only company I had an interview shortlist for. Even during the next day, in my head I was still angry at myself, and at the same time feeling sorry for myself because of my “poor luck”. I remember returning from a class, when I saw a group of Y22s talking outside L18. I knew most of them, in some way or the other my stint as secretary at FAC had acquainted us.
They had had a far more eventful day 1, but were yet to secure offers. I stopped to listen, hoping to find some sympathy from people who stood at the same point as me. The conversation quickly became a competition of grievances. Everyone seemed convinced they had been wronged by the process. Companies were foolish for not selecting them. Interviewers were biased. The people who had succeeded were lucky. The entitlement was difficult to ignore.
As the discussion went on, the focus gradually shifted from individual rejections to the people who had secured offers. One of my closest friends had also attracted eyeballs.
She landed an offer from her only interview on day1. A mediocre CPI girl, not exactly the kind of profile people expect getting a day 1 offer. A year later, during her summer internship, she asked one of her interviewers in the office why they had selected her over more technical and higher CPI candidates. Their answer was simple. She had been honest, humble and willing to work on errors. Feedback from the initial rounds was incorporated in the later ones. During one of her rounds, she was given a puzzle she had solved just the day before. Facing incredibly slim odds in a cutthroat intern season, the temptation to take the easy win and impress the recruiter must have been immense. Most of us, myself included, would have seized the opportunity to flawlessly solve it. Instead, she chose courage over greed, telling the interviewer upfront that she was already familiar with the question. A year later, the interviewer still remembered this incident for the same reason.
Over the next few days, I indirectly heard things in poor taste about her. Ranging from slut remarks to other girls complaining she was asked easier questions in the rounds. The next year, some people said she had a relative in the company who had favoured her over others. People cook up all kinds of stories to simply avoid facing their own mistakes and flaws.
I went on to secure an offer a week later. The people in that circle got sorted within the week as well. Their position of anger was understandable after all. They had worked hard for their better grades and profiles, and were promised that this would convert to a good opportunity. If not for the people close to me, I might have even stood at their place, thinking the same thoughts.
Now, I by no means, am an expert on how interviews work or what companies are looking for behind closed doors. All I know is that sometimes things just don’t work out for you, and work out really well for others. Sometimes, it’s the exact opposite. That is a part of the life we live here. If not for this randomness, it would be a dull, unadventurous life.
IITK is a competitive and ambitious place, that is an inescapable part embedded into many of our DNAs. Sure, it motivates us to try harder and achieve more but it’s important to notice when it makes us smaller. It can make setbacks feel like injustices and make you feel suspicious of other people’s successes. We owe ourselves the honesty to notice when that happens, both for ourselves and the campus culture. That is why honest friends are important, those who call you out when you lose perspective. We are after all, a sum of the people around us.
Placements and internships will always have factors of luck but no result is absolute and no hard work is truly lost. If we hang in there and believe, things do change for the better, sometimes in ways better than we imagined.
The final chapter
The final year is an interesting time. Most people come back from their internships and there is a realization of the sombre picture of the repetitive life that lies ahead. It’s like finally noticing the sand slipping through an hourglass that had been running all along.
I didn’t have to sit for placements, but many of my friends did. Placement week itself felt surreal from the outside—continuous interviews, barely any sleep, people trying to survive on adrenaline for days, and the mental toll of repeated rejections. Most of the people I was rooting for were sorted by the end of Day 2. Once that was over, it felt like the final chapter of IITK had truly begun.
Most responsibilities had finally settled down, and there was a strange freedom again, somewhat similar to first year but calmer this time. The chaos is still there, but it shifts. It is no longer about building resumes or collecting positions. It becomes about squeezing as much meaning as possible out of the time that remains. For me, that translated into days filled with poker, sports, bullas, and long stretches of quiet reflection.
You only notice the magic when it’s almost over. Amidst the trips, dancing, parties and the celebration of lives well lived in college, you begin to notice things that looked insignificant earlier, the trees around the roads, the view from your room, the birds and peacocks, even the simple cracked walls of the halls. You begin to see even in the smallest parts, the beauty that IITK gives to its students. You begin to appreciate how much of it you had taken for granted. The facilities, the culture, the traditions, and the systems built by generations of students before us. What once felt ordinary begins to feel quietly extraordinary.
Perhaps the rarest thing IITK gives us is proximity. Friends living a few seconds away, familiar faces around every corner, and the comfort of knowing your people are always nearby. I don’t think I’ll ever find all of that together in one place again.
Soon enough, all of us will be scattered across different cities, surrounded by concrete, traffic, cramped spaces, and badminton courts charging 600 rupees an hour.
And that’s what feels strange about leaving. We spend years wanting to get out, earn money, and build successful lives, only to later spend the rest of adulthood trying to recreate something even remotely similar to what we already had here.
I came reluctantly. I leave reluctantly. But with memories of wonderful people, a lifetime of stories, and gratitude for a journey better than anything I could have ever planned.
Written by: Naman Sethi
Edited by: Vedika Mimani, Shriya Suravarapu
