As We Leave #8: The Second Sentence

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In the 8th edition of As We Leave 2026, Chatla Sowmya Sri ,a graduating Y20 Computer Science Engineering student reflects on a six-year journey marked by academic struggles, termination, and eventual reinstatement at IIT Kanpur.

The story traces her path from the isolation of the pandemic to rediscovering purpose through persistence, support, and self-reflection, eventually finding her way to graduation and a role in RTL Design Engineering.

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 joined IIT Kanpur as a B.Tech, CSE student in 2020. I am graduating in 2026. If you do the math and realise it doesn’t add up, yes. That’s the story.

Let me go back.

#December 2022. ‘Three reasons I hated writing the appeal letter’

The first reason was that I hate writing. Give me a reel about preferring to solve 10 math integrals over writing an essay and I would like it at an astonishing speed.

The second one was worse. I did not really know what to write.

I needed a good reason. It had to sound legitimate enough to convince the council. And here I was, struggling to convince my own self. Should I say I struggled endlessly with the course content? Nah, scratch that. I did not even possess a proper attendance record. That brings us to a question: what exactly was I doing the whole semester then?

That was the problem. There was no reason.

‘How did I get here?’

As I kept looking for a better word, depression came up. One of my earliest memories of the word was when I read about Deepika Padukone being depressed years ago. I did not really get it then. What did it mean to be depressed, really? But as I used it, the reasoning started to hold up. I asked myself a question retrospectively then, ‘was I ever happy throughout this entire semester?’, and as I waited, the answer came back: no. The word I had borrowed five minutes ago started being the word for what I had been living.

#March 2020. ‘The break’s in 15 mins. Phew.’

A confession.

I did not know why, but these days, I was growing uncomfortable with sitting in silence. I kept wanting to talk to my mates. I kept looking forward to the weekends more than ever. I kept wanting to play badminton in the 30 mins free time we had in the evening. I was craving it all a little too much. Worse, I felt like I was only really breathing then. During one such afternoon, I settled down beside my friend and talked to and listened to her for three hours straight. It still didn’t feel enough. ‘Just… what was wrong with me?’ I felt strangely alone. Unlike how every other day in the past 2 years felt.

They were telling us to go home because of a pandemic, you say? That sounds delightful.

At the time, it looked like a break. In hindsight, lol. No. It was more like being sent back to the exact place I had always been afraid of.

#11^th and 12^th. ‘The fortress had to be held.’

During 11th and 12th, I dreaded going back home. Which sounds like I had some tragic, dramatic reason, but no. Mostly, I just did not trust myself there. In the hostel, I was perfect. Or whatever version of perfect includes mess food, substantial sleep, and solving the same headache-inducing physics question three times. The phone had already drowned me once before, right after 10th ended, in that long unstructured stretch before 11th began. The result was the first three months of 11th just sitting in front of books and doing nothing with them, watching my peers find their footing while I looked for mine. It had taken a long time to crawl back to focus, to rhythm, to discipline. So, holidays were not exactly “yay, home!” for me.

Then Mains Phase 1 went well. We were given a five-day home break before going back to the hostel. Five days. A small, harmless number. I told myself it was fine and that I was going back anyway. So, I let myself indulge. Reached for the phone. Let myself play one game. One game is a very funny phrase, by the way. It has never meant one game in the history of mankind. I did return to the hostel after the break. But the seed had already been sown by then.

Then March 2020 happened. Covid. The world shut down. Just home. Just the phone. Just my hand reaching for it before I could even pretend to be making a decision.

#2020-21. ‘The absent kid’

The thing is, I did get into IITK CSE. Which should have been this huge congratulations-beta-life-set moment. Except by the time college began, I was already not really there.

And college did not help, because college did not arrive as college. It arrived as a Zoom link. People were names on a screen, friendships were supposed to happen over Discord servers, and I was supposed to somehow become a college student through a laptop I was already losing hours to every day. I did try, initially. Joined things. Replied sometimes. Made small attempts. But slowly even that started shrinking.

The song of my distraction kept changing its tune: game, comic, novel, webtoon, drama. The avoidance did not. There was always a tiny element of trying. I would open a lecture, make a plan, decide that tomorrow I would become a completely different person. Tomorrow came. I remained the same person.

Three semesters passed like this. In the third, I was informed that going this way would lead to termination. The wake-up call arrived. I did not wake up. Instead, I just stopped sleeping properly, lying awake running through every possible outcome, somehow, and still reaching for the same escape the next morning.

#2022. ‘Never-ending tune’

By the time I came back to campus in 2022, the consequences had already unfolded.

Before this, everything had happened at a distance. The damage accumulated somewhere I could not quite see.

Now I was here.

Academic probation.

And a course layout that had diverged so far from everyone else’s that I was sitting in classes with the juniors and the seniors at the same time. Everytime I walked into a room, I recognized nobody.

I was not drifting the way I had been in 2020 and 2021. That phase had passed. But I was not okay either. I was somewhere in between. Present enough to see the full weight of what had happened, not present enough to know what to do with it.

#2023. ‘Hard Reset’

When the notice for termination arrived, I do not remember reacting very much. The emotional peak had already happened before, during all those sleepless nights. By the time the answer came, it did not feel like a shock. It just quietly inserted itself as the new reality. My friends were sorrier than I was.

Telling my parents was the part I had dreaded the most, but my father took it calmly. I remember feeling a huge burden settle down, which was confusing because nothing had really been fixed. But at least now, I was not hiding it alone.

The year that followed was quiet in a way that was hard to sit with. For a long time, IITK CSE had been an identity that consoled me. Even when everything else was falling apart, I was still, technically, a CS student here. Losing that too made me feel genuinely lost. I spent that year doing NPTEL courses for the reappeal, and somewhere in the background, reflecting. Not in a wise, cinematic way. More like sitting with the consequences because there was finally nothing loud enough to distract me from them.

Somewhere around July, I reached out to a senior who had once received a termination notice but made a complete turnaround. He helped lay out the options for me. I could transfer. Start somewhere else. Or wait and reappeal. I chose to wait. I knew that I could not go back to a lesser version of this. I knew that I would not be happy.

So, I waited.

I did not expect to miss the campus. But I found myself remembering the roads near RM. Everything else had been stripped away. What remained was a real desire to try. Properly, this time.

Around then, I found myself thinking about who I had been in 12th. And something about it was startling. I had forgotten. Not in a vague, abstract way. Very specifically. That version of me had genuinely liked working hard. Not tolerated it. Liked it. Liked the kind of sleep that comes after a day where you actually did something.

I had forgotten her so completely that remembering felt like running into someone I used to know.

It turned out to be me.

I also thought back to ESO204. A course I had failed previously. And I realised something. If I had just attended the tutorials, I would have passed for sure.

That was it, apparently.

The year ended with the reappeal meeting going well.

#2024-25. ‘The Hue of Blue’

The reinstatement mail arrived on January 1st. I found it on January 4th, sitting in the Hall 6 mess, half not expecting anything. It had been sent three days ago. I had missed it entirely. I opened webmail almost casually, the way you do when you are trying not to hope too hard. And there it was.

I was so very relieved.

Then the paperwork started. Because being reinstated and actually getting to study are two different things when your course layout looks nothing like the standard template. Figuring out which courses to take up felt like solving for a puzzle. The first problem arrived quickly: the senate had asked me to register as a day scholar with parental support. My parents are government teachers in Warangal. The logistics were brutal. I wrote a mail explaining this carefully, trying to sound reasonable and not panicked. It got resolved eventually. I exhaled.

The second thing was attending the classes. I had made a quiet commitment to myself, attend everything. So, when I showed up to MTH101’s allotted class twice and found no class running, I wrote a mail asking where exactly the lectures were happening and when they would begin. It was a small mail. An embarrassingly small thing to have to do. But I did not want to miss the first class. That was the whole point. Show up from the start so they know you are serious. So, you know you are serious.

I showed up. Regularly. And somewhere in the middle of attending lectures and actually paying attention, something quietly shifted. I realized I could still follow the concepts. I could still connect things, still track an argument across a proof, still feel the small satisfaction of understanding something properly. The brain was intact. I had been afraid, without quite admitting it, that it might not be.

The semester went well. Well enough that the MTH101 professor, handing back endsem papers, looked at my score and said, ‘why are you repeating this course?’ I did not really know how to answer that. I just took the paper and sat down.

Then came the summer, and the next battle. I needed three courses to move from academic probation to warning, which would unlock more credits, which would make the rest of the degree possible. I had done the math carefully. I had approached the relevant people proactively, from the beginning, explained the situation, asked for help. I had forwarded grades, written follow-up mails, made the case as clearly as I could.

On the day courses were allotted, I got one. Not three. One.

I remember crying in the shower. I had planned carefully, written the mails, made the case, and somehow the answer was still: one. I think that was why it hurt so much. It was not that I had not tried. It was that I had run into a wall, and the wall was very busy being a wall.

It got sorted eventually as my friends, who were on campus while I was on a flight back from my hometown, went to the office and requested on my behalf. It got resolved somewhere over the air between cities. But it hit.

I did my best that summer. To the extent of haggling over a single biometric attendance mark. I remember waiting outside a professor’s office in the ESB building for hours, just waiting, because I had been in that class and I needed the record to reflect that.

There were moments, especially during the harder courses, when I found myself wondering why everyone else seemed to have someone to call. A study group. A batchmate who had done it before. Someone who could explain the part that refused to make sense.

The semesters that followed were more maintenance work. By then, fatigue had become impossible to ignore, and I stopped pretending otherwise. I did just enough of what needed to be done.

There was one particular morning I woke up an hour late into an end semester examination. The kind of morning where you open your eyes and the first thing you feel is the specific horror of knowing exactly what you have missed. The professor let me take the test anyway. I sat down and wrote. I was so grateful I did not know what to do with it.

There was also a tutor who left a funny remark on one of my papers during one of the harder stretches. A small, human thing to do but it made my whole day.

I maintained a small ritual through all of this: an Excel sheet, color-coded. Blue for whatever courses had passed. It sounds minor but it was not minor. It was the only way I could see, concretely, that things were moving.

Every semester, there was a little more blue.

I kept going.

So, by the time placement season arrived, I was still tired, still scared, but no longer completely motionless. That mattered.

#The placement season.

I tried my best. Software interviews still did not go well. There was a pattern to how they all felt, like I was the problem, like I was missing something everyone else had figured out.

As I waited, a notice came. A company. A role: RTL Design Engineer. Skills listed were: Verilog and Haskell.

I remembered doing the programming languages course. I genuinely loved it, especially Haskell, and to the point where I remember thinking somewhere in the middle of it, ‘it would be good if I could work in this field somehow’. And computer organization course with all the Verilog labs, I had done those rigorously too.

Looking at the job description felt different. Like it was written for a specific kind of person, and I happened to be that person.

The interview also felt right. Not perfect. Just right. Unlike how the others did.

I got placed.

For a while, I think I only understood placement as a relief. One more box turning blue, one more impossible thing becoming less impossible. But the meaning of it settled in more slowly.

There is a renowned essay called “Welcome to Holland” by Emily Perl Kingsley. She writes about how having a child with a disability felt like planning a trip to Italy your whole life and then landing in Holland instead. The loss of that dream, she says, never fully goes away. But Holland has its own things. Windmills. Tulips. Rembrandts.

I felt that when I read it. I planned for Italy too.

Back in 2023, a sentence from a book review hit me hard.

“What do you do and what do you feel when you’ve basically ruined your own life, and it’s completely your own fault.”

It stayed in my mind for a very long time.

Much later, when I was doing much better, I went back to the original source and read the whole review and was surprised to find a second sentence which completed the story the first one was building towards:

“And how you kind of pick up the pieces and grow from there.”

Yes, the second sentence came later. Much later.

But it came. And slowly, so did I.

Notes from Holland:

For the absent kids with never-ending tunes ringing in their heads.

I did not really want to end this with advice. I used to not listen to much of it myself. But if there is one thing I can offer, it is this.

If doing things properly was once possible, ask yourself what aspect of you made it possible. Try to remember that person. If you look back at a failure, isolate the one thing that could have made it just a little better.

Then start participating in your life again, slowly. Attend the tutorial. Send the mail. Show up to the class. I think recovery is more like a blue spreading in your Excel sheet than any grand sudden epiphany and revelation. Solve problems as they appear.

And if you made it into IIT Kanpur, I have a hard time believing you are not a good problem solver. So treat your life like one. One problem at a time.

And do take whatever help is available to you. Counselling, therapy, friends or family.

Good luck in writing your second sentence!

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