My story probably starts similarly to a lot of kids who come to IIT Kanpur. Till 12th grade, I had been high-achieving; while I put in some amount of baseline effort, I mostly coasted through because the subject matter was interesting, and therefore, easy to me. I was a nerdy kid who would find herself spending hours on Wikipedia reading about synapses and neurotransmitters, about the Vietnam War, about limits of functions, just because. At every parent-teacher meet in school, my mother would complain to the teachers that I never really studied at home, and the teachers would, to her chagrin, always tell her to take a step back and let me be because I was getting good grades and was a great student otherwise.
I wanted to go to IIT because my older brother had gotten through, and expectations were high from me. Since the counselling system was mostly rank-based, and I was a young kid who didn’t make very good life-altering decisions, (I had originally wanted to go into the math department but was convinced that CS was ‘better in terms of job prospects’) I ended up in the CSE department, enrolled for a dual degree (in the era when they existed) and started my life at IIT Kanpur, with dreams, hopes, and ambition.
This is where my story diverges from some. Starting from the first semester itself, I struggled with the ‘Intro to Programming’ course. I couldn’t think in algorithms, or when I did, couldn’t translate that into code properly. Recursion eluded and frustrated me. I wasn’t used to this feeling; I didn’t understand it. I was trying, but everything was difficult and I would get frustrated and want to learn even less, thus forming a vicious loop. As I progressed through the semesters, the subject matter got even more difficult and I was progressively slacking. I started dreading going to classes because I couldn’t concentrate on, or understand anything. I started skipping a lot of them. There were still a few courses I really enjoyed and I applied myself and managed to get good grades, but I barely scraped through the other ones. I lost interest in my hobbies; I gave up all extracurriculars because I felt guilty not studying but I wouldn’t even study.
When I finally started with my thesis, matters took a turn for the worse. I was incredibly unsuited for research work, and after the first semester, I wasn’t getting almost anything done. I would barely step out of my room. I would read through the same research papers over and over, trying to make sense, but broke down so frequently that it didn’t feel normal; I felt slow and worthless. I had tied so much of my worth with ‘being smart’ that when this was taken away from me, my whole sense of identity had collapsed, leaving me with nothing. I started skipping meetings with my advisor because I assumed he wouldn’t understand anyway. I reached out to the Counselling Service for help at this point, but it didn’t seem to work.
When my friends started submitting their theses, I stayed behind and told them that I should be ‘done with my thesis’ in a few months. When my advisor told me he was giving me X grades, I couldn’t even process it. A committee decided to terminate my MTech degree and ordained me to work on a BTech project instead. This is where things got both better and worse. Worse, because when I appealed to the committee to consider one semester’s worth of work which I’d already done, as my BTP, they refused, because it wasn’t allowed for my batch and that ‘everybody else would want exceptions’. Better, because some student representatives in the Senate and department SUGC reached out to me, knowing about my case and hearing, and advised me, befriended me, got me out of my room, and quite literally, saved my life. Some kind professors in my department also helped me with the project, personally taking out time.
I had already been visiting the Counselling Service for a while now by this time and was on medications in addition to therapy visits but even then, the attitude displayed towards me by professors, and even Counselling Service had been one of disdain. They called my parents, who didn’t know about my mental health situation, and speculated that I must be having relationship issues because I was clearly an otherwise-problem-free student. Some members also invalidated the existence of my depression, because I wasn’t ‘clearly suicidal’. This is not to point fingers at anyone in particular, but I personally felt like the administration just hugely exacerbated my feelings of being burdensome and worthless.
Fortunately for me, it turned out that I had invested much less trust in my parents than they deserved because they supported me through just surviving and getting out, even if it meant not getting a degree at all. I started working on the BTP and in a few months, I submitted it and joined the company from which I’d received an offer.
When I think about it now, sometimes I still feel the shame. But I also feel relief, and disbelief, because what I had considered to be the end of the world, turned out to be just one lost year. I have learned what I need to do, on the job, and continue to learn what I didn’t during college. That said, I am grateful to my parents and friends who made me realise that a temporary setback didn’t have to define me and that we should never be ashamed of asking for help – because you might just get it from the people you least expect it to.
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Credits:
Edited by Ankur Banga
Poster Design by Tanya Arya
