I hope you are doing well. I am writing this blog to tell you something that will save you from many panic attacks in the coming days and something I wish I knew in my freshman year. Firstly you should be proud of your JEE results but not because it reflects your IQ, it reflects your hard work and perseverance. It is a very common mistake to assume that the course of your college life wrt to your batchmates is determined by your relative ranks. The day you start your college life, your JEE success becomes invalid. Though you carry with you some fundamental science and mathematics that can just be used as tools. So what will make the difference between you and the rest? Well you see friends, the key is time, luck, hard work, and smart work. Except for luck, the other keys are in your control. For some of you, the pursuit of knowledge may be fascinating and for some of you, the pursuit of financial success may be fascinating. Whatever suits you choose wisely the path for it, don’t follow the herd and wait for everyone to start, because time is key. You should consult your seniors on how to move forward in that path or ask about what they did, but never replicate the path, rather make your own, because every individual has a different background, different capabilities, different beliefs, and most important of all, different luck. What worked for them might work for you, might not, but of course, there will be key takeaways from their journey. While choosing a domain, if you consult someone there is a question you should not miss: “Why did you choose this field?”, Also before making a decision about not choosing a domain you should have some reasons and not do what the herd does.
See as much as you would curse the structure of your bachelor’s curriculum, remember that a bachelor’s is about touching up all the domains so that you pick the one that interests you, even though you might have to learn things you won’t like but most of them are worth knowing. When it comes to maintaining academic performance, from most people you would get the advice that, GPA is not of much significance or just maintain a decent GPA, but you should know scoring a high GPA right now is much easier than storing it in the senior years and if you get a headstart, it will be easier for you. In fact, your GPA will be used to judge your sincerity ahead in your career, and apart from that, it is responsible for the bundle of opportunities ahead in your career. This is something I wish I knew in my freshman year :( But note that a high GPA doesn’t guarantee success. For that, you should possess some skills required for the work you are targeting and detailed research about what goes on in that field. In your freshman year apart from scoring good marks, you must have time to explore some fields and get a clear picture of what you want to do as soon as possible. At times you will feel that you wasted time in learning something that you won’t be pursuing a career in, but remember no knowledge is ever wasted as an engineer you are expected to have an idea about everything not just ML or DSA, and trust me, if your learning curve is continuous you would not have lack of opportunities, things will align themselves to get you a good opportunity in your career sooner or later.
Among all these things remember that making friends is important, you may have a small group of friends, but they should have your back and so should you. Being isolated and trying hard may get you success in the short term but in the long term you need to be a team player. Freshman and Sophomore year is the best time to make close friends, so rather than in pursuit of overtaking your batchies try making some friends. In moments of self-doubt, it will be difficult and your friends will be there to make it easy. And the easiest way to make friends is to join societies of your interests so that there is a high probability of finding people with similar choices and beliefs. Please look for the selection dates of respective societies and keep up with their FB page so that you don’t miss important deadlines. Me and many of my friends were not active on FB and thus missed many opportunities.
There will be times when you compare yourself with a person and find your pace in life a lot slower than his/her. There are two possible scenarios in that case:
- You think that person deserves the success and appreciation he/she is getting and what are you doing in your life?
- You think that the person doesn’t deserve the success and appreciation he/she is getting and you are not getting what you deserve
Well, you can be wrong in both of these scenarios. But if not, start working hard if you have not yet, or in the second scenario know that the world was not fair,is not fair and will never be fair. So just keep doing what you are doing, rather than wasting time ranting, complaining, or regretting just move on. At last, I would say if nothing goes right, don’t lose hope, cherrish the things you have right now.
Signing off
Aditya Ranjan Jha