August 24, 2010

It was 1st of August, 2007, I joined Manipal Institute of Technology. I still vividly remember that day. Heavy rains and long walks to the lecture halls used to be as cohesive in our lives as the same daily menu of egg curry and 'coconut' chicken! I had heard so much about college life and here I was experiencing it first hand.

Days passed quickly, we were hoping from one set of sessionals to another; jumping between end semester exams and lab tests and before we could even realize; I am done with three years of my course. All of us used to ask ourselves the same question everyday, "How will we manage surviving for four years in this boring dull place?", and yet here I am, today, a student of final year, telling you that 1st August 2007 looks like yesterday.

I was sitting in one of my lectures, listening to everyone around me, of course professor excluded, when the idea for this entry struck me. I am not writing today to tell you about how much fun we had or to complain about college life coming to an end. I guess I have already done that in my last post. Today I am here to write about something different. Something that I have noticed over the past few weeks and something thats got me thinking!

I see my friends, my classmates, even people I do not know, and I feel that they have all somehow woken up from deep slumber! There is something about all of them that tells me that reality has caught up with all of them. Maybe this is what they mean when they say, "the rat race makes us a rat!". All of them have a look of fear and tense on their face. The topic of girls, crushes and alcohol seems to be a thing of past and have been replaced by what few would say, much more serious things like GRE, GMAT etc.

Everyone is either busy with their word lists or trying to configure routers on a simulation. Few have already aced the tests they took scoring 1550 in GRE while others have become Cisco Certified Network Associates (sounds pretty heavy)! Few of them are happy for being certified by Sun as Java programmers; while I sit here in front of my laptop singing praises for them!

I was always under the impression that the last year of college is meant for fun; after all it is supposed to be the last year of your life when you can sit and chat with your friends (or few with their girlfriends/boyfriends) till you pass out on their couch without worrying that you have to wake up early tomorrow or report to your boss. Well chats still happen, but now its mostly about placements, grades, scores and certificates.

All this has got me thinking about where I stand. I have not done any word list or any certification course; I was not even eligible for first few companies that visited my campus for recruitment. I sit back and I think. Where do I fit in? Looking back, these three years have been wonderful. There is nothing about them that i would want to change. Of course I would'nt mind a higher GPA or a few more certificates; but if I had to do it all over again; I would probably do it the same way. 

Was I too casual in my approach? Did I drift away? Did I go wrong somewhere? These are probably the questions that will haunt me and few others like me for sometime. I agree that there have been times when I could have probably been more serious but tomorrow when I look back, I am sure it will bring a smile to my face.

Cheers!!

PS I could not think of an apt title.