Disclaimer: Vox Populi, IIT Kanpur, is the exclusive owner of the information on this website. No part of this content may be duplicated, paraphrased, or interpreted in any other way without written consent from Vox Populi. If you want to reproduce any of the content on this page, please contact our chief editors directly or reach out to us by email at voxpopuli@iitk.ac.in.

In the 5th edition of As We Leave 2026, Debarpita Dash, a Y22 student in the Department of Biological Sciences and Bioengineering, shares her journey from a chaotic first year to finding her purpose as a BCS coordinator, a Prayas teacher, and a true friend. It is a story of stumbles, late-night philosophies, and unforgettable bonds that proves the right people can make any chaotic path feel exactly like 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.

i’ve been told you become a collage of the people you keep close. the people i chose, or the people who chose me, they shaped what i am. and i like what i’m made of. i like what IITK made me.

i once tripped on my own shoelace before i even made my first shot in fresher’s inferno. thoroughly embarrassed myself. that’s kind of how a lot of things went here, slightly chaotic, occasionally undignified, but the people around you making sure you showed up again. that the bad days, the ridiculous moments, the things that feel unbearable in the middle of them, eventually become the stories we tell. the ones we laugh at a little too loudly. the ones that soften, somehow, with time. maybe that’s the whole point. not to avoid the mess, but to live through it.

iitk didn’t hand me clarity. it handed me choices, too many, too fast, sometimes poorly made. not all of them worked out. some fell flat. some embarrassed me. some made me genuinely question what i was doing here. but none of them feel wasted now. they sit somewhere inside me like evidence. proof that i showed up, that i tried, that i didn’t just drift through.

“day by day, nothing seems to change, but pretty soon, everything’s different.”

the ordinary of it sneaks up on you. getting ready in fifteen minutes flat and somehow making it to class. eating mulberries off a tree like that was a perfectly normal thing to do. falling asleep mid-lecture and waking up slightly confused about what subject you’re in. going to sleep at 4 am, waking up at 7:50 am, and doing it all over again. cycling in the cold buried under layers, and then the same route in sweltering heat, and then in the rain. every season its own particular kind of suffering that, somehow, you’d take back in a second.

“it’s a magical world, hobbes, ol’ buddy. let’s go exploring!”

i had spent a long time thinking about what would make my awl unique, before realising no effort was required, it already was. there won’t be another version of this: accompanying sruthi for chai every single winter night like it was a standing appointment. enacting even the smallest, most inconsequential scenes back to manasvi with the full proficiency of a seasoned storyteller, and having her build on it until it became a full-blown production. calling pragati in the middle of the night to ask her where mamma mio was, because directions and i have never been on speaking terms. getting together to cook in eeshwari’s room because we had collectively decided the mess food was not it. going to shrimi’s room for no reason except that i was bored and knew i’d be welcome. and garima, who met every new thing i tried with an unwavering ‘manifest it’ and somehow made me believe it too. playing mafia or just going out for good food with my girl gang, including our first trip to goa together, which was exactly as chaotic and wonderful as it sounds.

being around the right people doesn’t make you perfect. it makes you honest. you don’t necessarily become a better version of yourself, you become a truer one. you mess up, and they laugh, sometimes mercilessly, but they stay. and that staying matters more than anything else.

manasvi, eeshwari, sruthi, shrimi, pragati, garima (and entire chai thodo), you are what i will carry forward most. the kind of friendship where you don’t have to explain the context, where the chaos is shared and the silence is comfortable too. i don’t think i fully understood what it meant to have people in your corner until i had you in mine. i am also grateful for the friends who came through manasvi and shrimi, the two social butterflies who seemed to know everyone, everywhere. they introduced me to people i may never have crossed paths with otherwise, and for that i am forever grateful.

mentioning my branch had to be a part of this, and i am so grateful for the choice i made during counselling. i have genuinely enjoyed the process of learning. i worked with a couple of labs in the department and learned so much. you start with an idea, half-formed, barely held together, and somewhere in the process it becomes a project. the project becomes something with weight, something with your name on it. another reason my branch has been so memorable is studying with eeshwari and manasvi: late-night sessions that would derail into philosophy, arrive at completely unhinged conclusions about life, and somehow still result in understanding the material. one thing that my branch gave me apart from my love for the subject was bsbe lab classes, never interesting for the content, always interesting for the company (thanks to group 8, special mention: sagar and asif).

calvin once said the trick is to find the right place and just hang around. for me it was less about the right place and more about the right people.

my first year was very chaotic and unguided. i did my summer project under one of the best seniors ever (aniruddh pramod) and for that i am grateful. i joined bcs, which forced me to interact more, to push past the comfortable, to make new friends. without bcs i wouldn’t be where i am. it opened my horizons. at the end of it i became a coordinator of the club, and all four of us (me, manasvi, udbhav, sagar) went from secies to coordies, and somewhere in the planning and the chaos, became family. everything that came easier after that traces back to that first decision to just show up and try.

i joined prayas too, and stayed. teaching those kids was a different kind of experience. they’d forget what i taught them the previous class with an almost impressive consistency, and yet, surprisingly, i had the patience to go back and explain it again.

“to invent your own life’s meaning is not easy, but it’s still allowed, and i think you’ll be happier for the trouble.”

i used to think i had to blend in. like there was a correct way to exist here. i tried, briefly, to follow that script. it didn’t fit. i don’t even enjoy half the things people say you’re supposed to. and yet, in the right company, even the things i don’t love become bearable, sometimes even good. not because the things changed, but because the people did.

“i’m significant!… says the dust speck.”

i’ve doubted myself more than i’d like to admit. coding, academics, skills where it felt like everyone else was operating from a manual i never received. but doubt isn’t as final as it feels in the moment. it shifts, slowly, when you keep going anyway. when you have seniors who guide you and friends beside you who will always support you. when you realise that not knowing something isn’t the same as not being capable of it.

learn to actually process your emotions. be vulnerable. be there for other people even if it is awkward, slowly you understand what needs to be done. keep reaching out for things even if you fail. the truth is, most of us discover where we are heading when we arrive. times like these are hard to make sense of, and sadly, this isn’t the only time you’ll feel so. but you’ll eventually learn to accept those as parts of your life.

“we’re so busy watching out for what’s just ahead of us that we don’t take time to enjoy where we are.”

i’ve been conflicted about a lot of decisions here. more than i let on, probably. but through all of it, the wrong turns, the restarts, the moments of genuine confusion, i never stopped exploring. the things i liked, i pursued with everything i had. and that’s something i want to carry forward, because you don’t get better at something by waiting to feel ready. you get better slowly, unglamorously, by going back to it and remembering why you liked it in the first place. that part, the returning, matters more than the talent.

i am delighted that i came here, that i stumbled into this place and these people and somehow got to call it home for four years. not a conclusion. not a lesson with a tidy moral. just a record, of choices made, of people met, of a version of myself that is still in progress, and striving to achieve more.

“that’s one of the remarkable things about life. it’s never so bad that it can’t get worse.”