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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.
In the final edition of As We Leave 2026, Kushagra Srivastava, a Y22 from the department of Computer Science and Engineering, looks back on four transformative years at IIT Kanpur, capturing how the campus experience fundamentally reshapes one’s outlook. His story highlights the importance of finding a tight-knit group of friends who act as an anchor, showing that the true value of the IITK journey lies in the lasting relationships and shared memories built along the way.
Four years later at IITK, how have I changed? I’ve been trying to sort through the complex feelings I have about this place, and after multiple desperate attempts to write my As We Leave, I realized I can’t do it all justice with a hastily written article. Honestly, I had almost decided not to write one at all.
So what do I write about? I’ve been on the other side of this before, convincing seniors to write because their story is uniquely theirs. Now that I am the one writing, I find it incredibly difficult to make it both unique and interesting. (i know i know, the irony is not lost on me). I have the memory of a goldfish and so I did the most obvious thing: I took a trip down my camera roll, hoping it would be a vault of perfectly preserved memories to draw from.
“Slow down you crazy child, you’re so ambitious for a juvenile…”
I had spent almost two years of my life studying for hours every single day, and the lockdown certainly didn’t make it any better. My world had shrunk to my home, and like so many others trying to navigate that strange, isolated blur, I was completely lost. After endless delays and multiple rounds of counseling, I had my heart entirely set on IITM. I was so sure I would get it. But, well, I didn’t. After practically living on that campus in my head, I was shoved into Kanpur instead, and I completely resented it. But thank God for this place.
I had to walk around this campus the first day. I HATED IT.
And then the very next morning, I saw this.
This campus turned out to be a breath of fresh air. It is the most free I have ever been, and probably ever will be. Over the years, that initial bitterness changed into appreciation for the quiet beauty this campus offers.
“But then if you’re so smart tell me, why are you still so afraid?”
Being in college, and I suspect this isn’t strictly unique to IITK, will completely obliterate whatever notions you had about a schedule. There is no straight answer to how you should be spending your time. Some days you will be in bed by 10 PM; other days you simply will not sleep at all. Some days you’ll study from morning to midnight and still feel behind; other days you’ll skip every lecture and feel strangely fine about it. Eventually you stop expecting any two days to look the same.
I remember walking into my first lectures for Quantum Mechanics and Real Analysis thinking, this is going to be easy. After all, I had just spent the past two years doing nothing but studying physics and mathematics. Lo and behold, I got a solid zero on the first quiz I ever gave here :p. It’s a brutal shift, and I questioned and doubted myself constantly. What all do I need to juggle to be deemed successful? But the truth is, for a good chunk of my time here, I just felt like my ass was on fire. It gets better though. I can’t tell you exactly when, but there’s this saying, things were dark then so that they could be light later, or something like that. You eventually learn how to juggle the chaos, and in this process, being right all the time loses its grip on you. Life here becomes less about doing everything all at once flawlessly and more about making choices that are mostly right, most of the time. You won’t always be right, and I’ve made mistakes I still regret, but all I can do is try to learn from them.
The night we stayed up 48 hours for a take-home end sem
Yes kids, for a while we used to write code without Claude.
“Where’s the fire, what’s the hurry about? You better cool it off before you burn it out…”
When I first arrived on campus in October of 2022, I was a different person in a lot of ways, and the same in many too. I’d never stayed away from my family, so moving in here was a big change, but I was eager for this place, and I expected the people I met here to completely remake the person I was. In hindsight, that was an incredibly naive expectation. Nobody here remakes you; the strange freedom of this place is that it hands you the room to remake yourself, for better and for worse.
The biggest and I think by far the most important impact that this campus had on me can be summarized in a quote from this blog,
When I first came here, I did not think much about my identity beyond someone who was good at school, I did not think much about problems beyond the ones that were in my p-sets, and I assumed institutions operated in the interest of the people they served. I can’t condense this shift – mine or campus’s – into a few sentences, but I will say that watching current students (and staff and faculty) grapple with the world as their whole selves, no matter how imperfectly, has changed me in ways that I hope will only grow.
During our orientation, we were sold this idea that the world inside IITK is a “utopia” compared to the city of Kanpur, and by extension, the rest of the country. I’ve found that to be only partially true. Academically, sure, we might be on a better footing. But as a collective, we suffer from tunnel vision. We get so caught up in our own stuff that we forget that this institution is nothing but a brutalist concrete jungle without everyone that is on campus, including the students, workers, dhobis, guards, faculty and so on, and beyond all the brilliance of this campus, there is a real amount of sorrow and the losses this place has carried.
Especially over this past year, I’ve spent hours within and outside Vox debating and trying to comprehend how the people who hold the actual power to bring about change can sometimes appear so painfully apathetic. Don’t get me wrong; I know they are trying to fix things in their own way. But to me those efforts often feel misguided. Being a part of these discussions humbled me by showing me how insignificant we are in the machinery of the system, but it also empowered me to speak up anyway.
And amidst all the chaos of this campus, it is where I found my people.
67 is an impulse reaction at this point
You are, more or less, the average of the people around you and choosing them matters more than almost anything else. So much of college is already decided for you in the form of a template, and the only variables are who you spend your time with. The people around you shape how you handle everything that isn’t on that template. I think it’s the most underrated thing you take away from this place.
If you know me even a bit, you know that I am not the best at decision-making. Making good choices is a talent that comes innately to some; the rest of us just have to rely on sheer, dumb luck. In the early days, I threw myself into every gathering I could find, trying to find people who would simply enjoy my company. I’ve since realized that being here isn’t about being universally liked by every group you stumble into; it’s about actively finding the specific people who will anchor you. Thankfully, I found mine.
On paper, my college life has been about as ordinary as they come, and I’ve made my peace with that. We love to say “I have no regrets.” But the truth is that things will be hard here and there, even when you make the right calls, and especially when you make the wrong ones.
What I’ll miss and won’t regret, though, is the romance of the mundane. Chugging Coke and Lays almost every night. Late-night Pav Bhaji at DoAA Canteen (rip). Barging into my friends’ rooms when I’ve nothing else to do. Sitting in KD doing absolutely nothing just because it was too hot outside. Eating waffles on OAT stairs. The ridiculous pride of acing an exam after pulling a one-nighter, and the immediate hypocrisy of blaming the professor when I completely messed up the next one (I’m looking at you, CS202.). I’ll miss ranting about how these courses are irrelevant, even though I picked them up. I’ll miss waking up to Aujasvit aggressively shouting the most random meme catchphrase imaginable. And I’ll miss walking around at 3 AM being completely vulnerable with friends who were just as clueless about life as I was.
I’ve always wondered, 15 years from now if I wander back onto this campus and someone asks me to point out my old room, which one will I choose? Will I point to the Hall 13 room where I spent my time being overwhelmed? The Hall 1 room? Or Hall 3? If you would have asked me this question a while back, I would have said E256, Hall 3 without missing a heartbeat. Interestingly enough, back when we were choosing our rooms for third year, we stumbled upon an old Spark essay that convinced us we absolutely had to have that specific room (iykyk). I’d like to think that we made pretty spectacular use of the space. But now, I believe every room holds a different version of who I was.
MasterChefs at Work
Our Last Supper
I’m going to graduate soon, and I really hope I don’t hear the kind of speech that boils down to “AI is the future”
This did not end well. :/
“When will you realize… Vienna waits for you?”
I was quite okay at the thought of leaving this campus. I think I’m okay with it because the campus was not really the thing I was ever afraid to lose. It was the room, and the people who turned it into a home. Some of them are now going to be across the world. In a few weeks someone else will move into these rooms and have no idea it was ever ours. We’ll all go our separate ways, but none of us will ever again have a room that is quite so much ours. I think that’s the part I wasn’t ready for.
A heartfelt thank you to Kushagra, our former Chief Editor. This is not just a farewell note for our “Chief Editor”, but for a senior who was always by our side through the good and bad. Thank you for an unforgettable tenure, for always making us feel like we could talk to you about anything (serious or unserious), and for the endless parties 🙂 .
We wish you all the very best in your journey ahead.
-Team Vox Populi 25-26
Written by: Kushagra Srivastava
Edited by: G. Lakshmi Harika, Suhani Joshi
