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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
“Storage Space Full. 127.9 GB out of 128 GB used.”
“Well, I guess I will finally do it.”
It’s a task I had been avoiding for the last 2 months (my last 2 months of college). Obv I didn’t want to waste a single moment there.
This problem was a gift of my negligence as I had never disabled auto-download on whatsapp. In my defense, I remember doing it 2-3 times but it somehow turns back on.
So off I go to my gallery, and I see 30000 items. I realized this is gonna take a while and it did, not because of the ones I had to delete but coz of the ones I decided to keep.
We started college at the end of October’22. Yes, we were affected by COVID as well, at least our summer holidays were. Living in a hostel was already new to me and then came the orientation and some IITK specials – baapu- amma culture, lingos, etc etc..
IITK gave me some amazing friends in the form of wingees. Chiranshu, Harshit, Pavi, Avinash, Gagan, Ayush, Ujjawal, Jayant and 18 others… all the weird birthday cakes, nicknames, GPLs, late night cyclings (in winters)…. were the highlights of my 1st semester.
“1st year me sb kuch explore karo…”
This is the line you might have heard from your bappu/amma, wing bapus, chachas literally everyone. We had a 9 day long orientation and there was one club which I could not take my eyes off…. dance. It was just their sheer brilliance that got an introvert like me wanting to dance without analyzing whether I actually could do it or not. I wish for such an innocent thinking process nowadays.
This motivation got me practicing day and night for freshers night which is also when I used instagram for the 1st time, so now you really understand the introvert part, and performing in galaxy for hall 3 where I made some friends (Aadi, Avinash, Aman) who are now on my speeddial.
For aman, it started with a little bit of jealousy, sorry brdr. He was a part of the Antaragni team which I was rejected from due to lack of dancing skills and when our Y20 senior Sameer asked him “konse gaane hai tumhare?”, he replied with the two songs I loved the most from the thomso performance (show out and tere bina). I guess it is fine because ‘all’s well that ends well’ until of course I try to forget how I got his laptop broken that too in between his coordinator interviews. He says he’s forgiven me though.
I also met with 2 of my seniors, Bitthal and Ashish, both of them exhausted from Antaragni, sometimes it felt like they were in the same boat with us for that galaxy. Most of the rigorous, mind breaking and body decaying practice was managed single handedly by Sameer, was a nightmare for us but now when I see it from a senior’s perspective it is somehow even harder to do what he did. After all that, we managed to get 3rd position in group dance and from the street battle,
With all of this going on, I was trying to manage my academics as well. I was aware that they needed to be kept in check but the urge to explore different things was always there. I am from the civil engineering department and like most of the 1st year students from this branch, I wanted a branch change. I got a decent cpi but it wasn’t enough to get me into any of the circuital branches. My 1st year ended with a sense of unease and doubt.
“Balancing Extracurriculars and Academics:”
It felt like there was no space to breathe in the 3rd semester. The civil engineering template had 60 credits, on top of that I had decided to be a dance club secretary. Orientation, rendezvous, Antaragni and then Inter IIT. I used to come from practice at 5 am and go to classes at 8 am. Something I was unable to replicate in any of the upcoming semesters. While going through my gallery, I still see countless pictures of lectures that probably never made it to my nervous system.
Nevertheless this semester was made special by all the people I met through dance club. My fellow secretaries – Pushpdeep, Kushagra, Khushi, Sneha, Tanya, Sankalp, Vaibhav and more and my seniors – Vrinda, Kaustav, Chaitanya, Nikhil, Adarsh and Rohit. We improved with each performance. I can’t look at the orientation performance (yes, one year ago this was what pushed me to learn dance) , then rendezvous, then in antaragni we got 2nd position and in Inter IIT, we got 6th.
Yes, you read it right. If you look at it closely, the performances started getting worse as you start moving from 6th to 1st position. IIT Guwahati was given the 1st position and I can challenge you to try and watch their 10 minute performance without skipping or closing it in between.
“Bonnies and clydes”
Becoming a coordinator was once on my wishlist but not on my to do list. It took little to no effort to convince me. After some horrific interview days, I was made the coordinator of dance club. Aadi, Savi, Avinash, Aman, Cheddi, Shah, Mausam, Jiggy – these are names that will be with me till the end of my life. I cannot imagine my college life without them nor could I have endured the rigorous practice sessions. All the stress and problems of my internship and placements were bearable as long as I was in the dance room with all of them. During our tenure, we never stopped and looked behind. We won every single thing. It was kind of a dream. It started with 1st position in Antaragni jitterbug, then we made it to the finals of Tour De Force (an event where we would repeatedly fail to win a single round) and finally lifted the Dance Cup in IIT Patna after four years. The journey is so beautiful and so long that I don’t have the necessary writing skills to properly express it and if I start writing here, I will definitely miss the deadline to submit this.
“Intern kaise lagwate hai….”
Without a single strand of doubt, this is the most difficult phase of my college life and it stripped me of the most important skill a student needs : self confidence.
My internship season started from 29 July. That is when I had my interview rounds for BCG. After being told that I had a good first round, I got an interviewer in my 2nd round who barely listened to me as I tried to solve the given guesstimate. Maybe I could not give him what he wanted but at that time I had no idea. After being rejected from BCG, I had a string of failures, partly due to lack of preparation and partly due to luck. BNY Mellon, Cisco (HR Round) , Tata Steel, ICICI Bank, Battery Smart, Infoedge, L&T Infotech, LTIMindtree – an 8.0 CPI and a SURGE project can get you a lot of interviews in a lot of good companies but it’s totally up to your preparation to get that offer. When I look at this list, any one of these companies would have looked way better on my resume. You might be confused as to where did I go wrong, well so was I and a lot of people who knew me. But now that I look back, It’s pretty clear what went wrong. I was hesitant to ask for help, from my seniors as well as my batchmates and for no justifiable reason. I used to ask seniors about what will be asked in the interviews and what to prepare, but never talked to them when I felt defeated unlike some of my juniors who were in touch with me during their intern season.
Believe me, your seniors will always be available for you no matter what and just talking and sharing stuff with them is really really helpful, it makes a world of difference. They have been through these times and are the best suited to understand your state of mind. After the BCG failure, I messed up the BNY interview but prepared well for CISCO, ignoring my midsem preparations which were scheduled just 2 days after this. After having the HR round, I was hopeful of getting the offer since only 4 people were selected for it. They ended up rejecting me, selecting 2 students and the next day I had 2 exams (morning and evening), which obviously went awful. The correct decision here would have been to put this behind me and prepare for the next opportunity which I failed to do.
At one point, I hated when opportunities came up and clashed with my dance club events. I had decided to not appear for the ICICI bank interview which happened during antaragni practice until Bitthal forced me to go and study for it. I reluctantly went for the test rounds of Futures First since I wanted to see my secys perform in cypher hustle in Galaxy.
I have rambled on for too long and it’s just to show that at every step my family, my seniors were there and stopped me from taking rash decisions. It is also to show that no matter how bad things go, you need to move on and keep working.
“My research trip to Dubai”
Then on 20th January came a surprise, the research paper on which me and Tanya had worked on got accepted. For both of us, it was quite unbelievable. When the paper was submitted to the conference, we had not even thought of it getting accepted. We never expected it. We were invited to Dubai to present it, but my mind, completely drenched in intern worries, almost made me skip this too until I was convinced by my family to go there.
I would like to thank Prof. Salil Goel under whose guidance and support, me and Tanya were able to write a research paper. His belief in us drove the project and it was him who pushed us for the paper.
“I want to dance more”
Most of the people who know me might complain that I cannot stand still at all. Its not my mistake that I was made to repeat something so much that now I love to repeat it. People talk about muscle memory and how it acts on stage, for me, it’s different. That is why, while it was difficult to say goodbye to this college, it was equally difficult to hand over the charge to our juniors. You practiced day and nights for events for 2 years and now suddenly all you do is lay down all day or go to classes. It obviously gives you withdrawal symptoms. Fourth year was difficult, firstly placements which I will talk about in a while, then the complete removal of physical activity from my daily routine. I still wanted to dance, still wanted to stay connected with the club. So, I decided to perform Just Duet with Vignesh. The fact that I am able to write separately about dance in my 4th year is all thanks to him and my juniors :Tanishq, Abhinav, Rishi, Aniket, Karan, Unnati, Chhavi, Dishank.
After placements, going to the dance room and practicing, having fun with them is something that I will miss.
It was all thanks to them that we had one of the most memorable Dance Extravaganza and the best farewell I could imagine.
D-day:
It was December 1,2026: the day had arrived.
I had only one interview in 1.1 for CapitalOne. I got a decent round 1 and was rejected. I wasn’t thinking about it that much and decided to sleep and focus on the phase 1.2 where I had the majority of my shortlists. In the morning, while going for a GD for SLB, I got a call : “Aapka mastercard ka interview hai 10 minutes me”.
It is stupid how lightly people take things when they themselves aren’t involved. When asked, the coco tells me “Hume pata tha pehle se but hmne abhi bataya aapko” without any care or regard on his face. After thinking about which opportunity to leave, I left the SLB GD and went for the mastercard interview. The next 3-4 hours were me running from one wing and another in hall 13, giving multiple rounds for Mastercard, Accenture, Blackrock, Indus Insights. There was so much overlap that I had multiple calls coming to me during interviews.
It’s 5 pm and I am done with all of the interviews. I had got positive reviews from all of the interviewers, and I thought to myself, this time I will know the feeling of getting sorted. “Ek na ek offer to mil hi jayega.”
Time started passing by and the offers started rolling out but not for me. Mastercard? no, Blackrock? No, Accenture? No news but some people had received their offers.
I was completely exhausted and was thinking about what I will do in my next interviews. “Pura try krunga” , but “abhi tk whi kr raha tha”. I didn’t know where I was going wrong. The very minor mistakes that I might have made came back to my mind, surely they were not that bad or were they? I thought I had kept the intern worries behind me and all of it came back. I had my friends with me, Avinash looking for walk-ins, Savi trying to comfort me and motivating me to give it all in the next interviews. I had interviews in phase 2.1, but if I don’t know what to improve upon how will I get an offer?
Another 15 or 20 minutes pass and I get a call, “aapko accenture ka offer aagya hai”. My voice broke before I could finish the call and tears came down from my eyes. I did try not to cry but in vain. I was relieved, it felt like I had taken a mountain off my chest. I called my mom and dad to give them the news. I finally got rid of my internship horrors. Later as I would get to know, I got a late offer from blackrock and was on the waitlist for Mastercard. The slight doubt in my mind was removed as well.
The placement season is gruesome and can break people. Watching people get placed while you are still waiting in line is not easy. All of my friends did not get placed and when I was with them I could see the stress and exhaustion they went through. It’s very important to take care of yourselves and your friends in those days. Please stay there for them, every comforting presence there counts.
A great thanks to my placement buddies Savi, Aadi, Mausam who were with me at all times ; my seniors Bitthal, Kaustav, Vrinda, Shreya, Khushi for all the support and advice ; Avinash and two y24s, Akhil and Subhajit, the ones who ran from one corner of hall 13 to other for me that day. I will never forget the gmeet case interviews with Savi and Bitthal. From where I was in my internships, it would have been impossible to come this far without them.
“Maine janpad abhiyantriki me pravesh liya hai”
It is a really tough branch but when coupled with some amazing people the courses become fun. Way too many group projects and assignments and between all of them were my civil peeps : Arya, Kanishk, Riya, Aditya, Sankalp, Tanya, Prem, Shreya, Varun, Saloni . Unfortunately, I never had all of them in a single group project.
I would also like to thank Prof. Salil Goel under whose guidance and support, me and Tanya were able to write a research paper. His belief in us drove the project and it was him who pushed us for the paper.
“Life in the last semester”
“When you are at this stage, your friend circle gets shorter and shorter, eventually you are left with a few people who you spend all your time with”, I remember hearing this from one of my seniors.
There is always a clock ticking in your mind, a countdown and it teaches you to cherish the interactions the bonds you have made throughout these 4 years. It was not easy to say goodbye but if given the option, I would gladly live it all again.
P.S. : This college life account has been written with extreme deadline pressure. Just like the project submissions in college. If you have interacted with me a lot and your name is not here, I sincerely apologize
Written By : Karunaya Garg
Edited By : Kushagra Srivastava