An experience of a lifetime Part 1

I never expected my blog to become so very famous that people start demanding posts. Anyways, here it goes….
This is a series of articles based on my IIT experienced starting from the first year onwards. I shall put down all my memorable experiences of the last 5 years.

However before I begin, I would like to congratulate one of my closest pals Rahul Gupta. He got a terrific job yesterday in i2 technologies. This was the last company in the campus and he cracked it. In all probability he will be sent abroad. I wish him all the best and I am sure he is going to go places.

5 years ago, when I landed up in the campus, I was a starry eyed, simple innocent teenager. Coming from a background which had never boasted of an engg leave alone an iitian, I was simply overwhelmed by the fact that I got into the best engg college of India. In school and everywhere else I was a big fish in a very small pond. But here suddenly I was thrown into the ocean teeming with various varieties of fish, sharks and other species. Until I got into IIT ,I always considered iitians to be from a different planet, they were something extraordinary, God’s gift to mankind. They could do what many will not even dream of doing. Today, I have no hesitation in saying that I was afraid to come to IIT. I was afraid of the competition, afraid of the people I would meet, afraid of the profs, afraid of everything here.

My IIT sojourn started on a bad note. I was expecting to get into the Btech course In Energy Engg, however by sheer bad luck I missed it by just 11 AIR ranks and instead landed up in a dual degree course. I had never lived away from my parents barring a few odd cases. It was really tough mentally, to adjust to the fact that I might not see them for months. The day I left for Kgp, I was excited for I was going to a new place, but I had no idea that though my parents were keeping a happy countenance, they were actually crying inside. I am dead sure that it must have been very tough for them.

On reaching the Kharagpur Railway station, there was a bus waiting which took us to IIT Kharagpur which was going to be my second home for the next 5 years.

As we entered the imposing campus, I was awed by the magnificient red coloured main building. In italics “Dedicated to the service of the nation” was written on the building. We were then allocated our rooms. I was expecting to get a single room, but I was shocked when two of us were put into a single room meant for one. My roommate, though a Bengali by birth was as different from me as possible. He was a typical Bihari, with a bihari ascent an extrovert sort of guy while I was an introvert. The very thought that I would have to spend one entire year in the same room as this fellow was traumatizing. Anyways, adjustment was the necessity of the day and I tried to adjust as much as possible.

The first few days of a new semester at IIT is always very hectic. More so if it happens to be the first year of your stay and you don’t know how the system works. You have to run around and by the time you reach the actual office or counter, it is closed by then. The first week was very taxing. More so, as I did not have any cycle and had to walk around the entire campus. Anyways the classes started and each class had strength of around 120. The courses were too many, tough, the profs not very good (surprised??????, well that is a truth). All in all it was a nightmare to get used to the system. The pace of teaching too fast, I hardly used to understand anything in class….thus I gradually stopped attending classes. I was awed by the quality of students and their receptive power. Students were apparently being able to absorb what ever was being taught with ease whereas I was hardly being able to understand them. An inferiority complex did creep into my system. More so when I got a bad SGPA at the end of the first sem.

The second sem was as different from the first sem as possible. It started with the introduction of computers in our hostel rooms and this entirely changed the culture of IIT Kharagpur. The details of it are reserved for another post.

P.S. Had our dept farewell today. It was the last time we were going to have dinner together in our dept. Really feeling very nostalgic at this moment. These last five years have really flown by quickly. In one sentence, the IIT experience is “an experience of a lifetime” and I am privileged to have got it. Thank you God!!!!