2

(This ‘2’ is for good luck chat)

And Then, There was IIITH

It took me two years to build a dream. And six hours to watch it die.

My IIT dream was killed by my JEE Advanced rank.

I was drowning in a quarter-life crisis when some relatives whispered “IIITH” and my parents hit that apply button faster than I hit bedrock. I wasn’t in the right mental state to have my own opinions at that point, so I let them make this decision for me.

After I buried the only future I had ever planned for, my IIITH journey began, with a random Reddit thread and the phrase: “Zero Campus Life”.

For a girl who had prayed for the JEE nightmare to be over so she could finally enjoy a fantastical college life like in the movies, this was a death sentence.

The internet ripped my soul to shreds. Quora doomscrolling kept punching me in the gut, with the attendance policy, sports credits, endless assignments, horrible grading and essentially disgusting college culture scaring the crap out of me.

“You are going to go through five more years of JEE,” they said. I prepared myself mentally for the supposed incoming torture, pushing away other options like the huge campus and crazy fest life of the IITs, NITs, and BITS, and came here, to this random small campus that nobody seemed to know.

Now, as I write this, a year down the line, I can confidently say that they were wrong.
Not just wrong. Violently, cosmically, soul-shatteringly wrong.

This is IIITH from an idiot’s perspective: from someone who simply didn’t care about the academics or the research during her first year and instead made a blood pact with herself to squeeze every drop of happiness she had missed out on during JEE.

My only goal was to touch grass for the rest of the year.

No More Goblin Arc

Right off the bat, induction week was nothing short of fantastic. I was so chronically online before college that I’d already formed a decent friend group before even setting foot on campus. So, every single induction meet, whether it was the awkward parents’ session or one of those million boring Apex meets, was spent laughing and dying on the back benches with this newfound circle.

We pulled up to every single event, even the most whack ones. I didn’t know a single thing about astronomy, but there I was, blindly guessing through some Astro Freshers Quiz (we scored, like, 1/10, peak illiteracy).

I’d never danced in my life, and yet, at Spotlight, I was taking centre stage and doing god knows what. We made a short film, scammed our way through the treasure hunt (without slippers btw, long story), and recorded the most bizarre things for the scavenger hunt. All in the first five days.

Painting? Music? Debate? If something was happening, we were there. Time flew, mornings were chaos, and nights were, well, even more chaos, mainly senior interaction sessions and storming into random rooms, scouting for new friends, food and gossip. 

After induction came Freshers’ Night. Days and nights of practising and volunteering for absurd things.Write a script? Participate in a Gaali battle? Dance for the telugu song (I’m not even telugu)? Glaze seniors for no reason? Hell yeah, count me in.

Prom was insane. My first exposure to anything like it. From playing matchmaker for friends and making sure no one went dateless (no man left behind), to watching everyone get dressed up, to wearing makeup for the first time. Yeah, I did it all. From consoling people through heartbreaks to clowning on them until they cried (usually both in the same conversation). 

I still remember how some people disappeared right after induction week, locked in their rooms. They didn’t even show up to watch. And sure, a little fomo creeped in, the competitive spirit was starting to get me again. But honestly? I’d made a decision. No room-maxing goblin arc for me. I wasn’t gonna waste a single night locked in.

What’s CG? I am Pakistan

Then came the first Quiz. Welp, things were getting serious. The timepass was over. This is prolly where the ‘grind’ restarts. “It was fun while it lasted, but I have to go back to the slogging” I decided.

Instead, I found myself on an aimless walk at 4 am, before an exam at 8:30 am the next day, having finished 0 per cent of the syllabus. Under streetlights and sleepy skies, somehow, talking freely made me question parts of myself that I didn’t know existed. There I was, rediscovering myself, 2 hours before an exam I was going to flop.

This was the case almost every day of the quizzes. I was barely above average in those quizzes, but I didn’t care. ‘Grades are cringe’ was my new philosophy.

By midsems, I had studied a cumulative total of 0 hours in college. Whenever people ask me “How much do you study?” I always think 5-6 hours — a month (this isn’t gpt guys emdash is good grammar). Man, never had I gone absolutely empty-brained with zero prep for a paper in school. Now? It was almost a routine; I did it without flinching.

Somewhere around then, Felicity Buzz hit. This was it. My first-ever glimpse into the charm of a college fest. Everyone, cousins, seniors, and random Reddit threads had warned me that first-years don’t get to do fest work. I didn’t care. I was happy to watch from the sidelines.

BOY, were they wrong again. I didn’t step foot in my room for seven days straight. Whether it was spamming posters, setting up decor, or juggling events for the clubs I was already in, if something was happening, I was in the thick of it. It was pure mental joy, running here and there between venues, getting insane lore from seniors, and secretly hoarding every extra piece of decor for my room. My only source of food was the thousand treats I was showered with.

The Buzz excitement carried over to Felicity. Those three days? Burned into my soul. Permanently.

I never understand when people call our fest useless or stupid. Sure, they are on a smaller scale, but when you’re on the inside (the fest team ayy <shoutout gang>) and get to see how an event evolves, from a billion ideas to the final execution, you can’t help but get excited. I was in everything: MUNs, gaming events, dancing in flashmobs, learning classical dance (and then promptly getting kicked out), anchoring events, helping with stage setup, acting in skits and screaming myself hoarse while cheering. I was so happy.

Some weeks were pure adrenaline. No sleep. Days of Felicity were no joke–insane: convincing (read: begging, threatening, blackmailing) all the inactive kassis to participate and going grit mode learning dances and songs literally a day before we had to go on stage. I’d be practising for four different dances and skits until 6 or 7 in the morning, only to rush off and represent Pakistan in a MUN the next day. I once survived an entire day on food vouchers I won in random competitions (y’all should really participate, my god, they are easy to win) just so I could save money for the cool stalls that came by at night. For all three days, I was spotting friends in the randomest of places doing the randomest of things and bouncing from group to group like I was some hyper NPC with a side quest at every corner.

The extrovert in me flourished. It was nothing short of a whirlwind. Every activity on campus, man. I was either part of it or cheering from the front row, surrounded by the dozens of friends I had caught like Pokémon through the months. Felicity wasn’t just a fest. It was the cannon event that finally set me free from the aftermath of the JEE bloodshed. No more regret

Jack of all Clubs

It wasn’t just the fests that made college feel alive; it was always bustling. The club culture is small, yes, but faaaar from dead. I was cooking attendance for clubs more than my actual courses. Someone, somewhere, was always organising something: from rock to unplugged to meltdown nights by the music club, debates nearly every week, sometimes even out of state for competitions (#1 speaker btw), quiz and dance competitions, SO MANY random hackathons (we didn’t win any, but we learned a lot more than we did during classes), we did a CTF and even tried creating a startup (and failed but easily top 10 memories of college). I always had something to look forward to.

Onam, Tamil New Year, Garba, Dahi Handi. We had comedic rivalries to make our festival the best one there. No one was happier than my mother when photos of me cutting beans and putting rangoli reached her somehow. I had never done all this before, and now suddenly, the director of the college was appreciating our low-effort, high-impact aah masterpiece.

College pulled out parts of me I didn’t even know existed. I was the most unathletic person alive, yet by the second sem, I’d played in a truckload of competitions: cricket, frisbee, volleyball, and had even run a 10k for free sports attendance. Every day had something new to jump into, and I took insane advantage of that. 

I joined clubs on a whim, sometimes just because the seniors were cool. And somehow, they took me in. That’s the beauty of a small college. You don’t need experience to be included. Whether it was quantum computing, the music club (I have absolutely nothing to do with music or quantum computing) or random RAships in design, I kept getting the chance to explore everything. I was everywhere, doing everything, with zero qualifications. I was some background extra with too much screen time.

I used to loaf around in between classes, spam maggi from VC, and sprint to the workspaces for club meetings or to doze off in the glorious AC. I’d often find my jobless friends there; gaming, doom scrolling or simply knocked out, hogging all the chairs. We’d roam all over Hyderabad, go on hour-long walks, help set up events, crash them for fun, or just sit around laughing at the few friends still trying (and failing) to study: before dragging them into our timepass spiral. Then, straight to class (often directly next morning, after a whole night of brutal time-pass)! Notice how there is little time for studying?

I was outside campus most nights. Walking randomly, aimlessly, sometimes so far we had to turn on maps to find our way back. There were night shows in half-empty theatres, surprise concerts, and a lot of impulsive plans that turned into peak memories.

This was my life. It was, unironically, all rainbows and sunshine.

THIS TOO SHALL PASS

Weirdly enough, the EndSem season was the freest time of the year. 

There was so much to study, and yet not many really did. No classes, no assignments, just hours and hours of free time with a humongous syllabus. There was a time when all of us practically lived in the workspaces, sleeping there for days on end. We’d study whenever we could (read: barely enough), and waste time like we were speedrunning failure%. For quite a few exams, I was cramming random PPT slides the night before, scamming my way through answers (and then arguing with the TAs <cue pls sar pls sar>).

It is a strange, floaty feeling when you’ve barely scraped through an exam and your entire friend group has too. The collective dead-eyed stare and the look on everyone’s face after a disastrous paper, followed by the ritual of coping in the dumbest ways possible.There’s nothing quite like the bond formed through shared academic trauma. The crushing sorrow of absolutely fumbling an exam somehow turns into uncontrollable laughter when you see your bro’s face (especially when bro fumbled it just a little worse). Misery really does love company, and in those moments, it’s the best company you could ask for.

Yes, the labs and assignments are hell, especially when you’re burnt out from years of grinding and you don’t want to touch a book anymore. But honestly, once you get the hang of it, it’s not just manageable, it’s fun. There is some joy in rushing through an assignment and submitting it 6 seconds before the deadline. 

My first priority? Doing what my heart wanted me to do.

Even if that meant sitting through four club meetings back to back, and then panic submitting an assignment at 11:59 PM. (obviously followed by a JC trip to celebrate NOT losing 10 per cent of my course total)

Some days were so packed, I didn’t even have time to think about the graded lab that was around the corner. I didn’t care. I knew I’d clutch it last minute somehow. “Everything gets fixed, so there’s no point in worrying”. Over time, I gained that faith in myself. I stopped trying to allot time to studying and started following my heart (and my friends) directly into academic bankruptcy instead.

Things kept coming, man. They didn’t stop. In the beginning, I used to think “I’ll start studying everyday after X event gets over”, and then be disappointed when something else came up. After a while, the realisation hit me that I was never actually going to grind. It was not in my nature anymore; I was simply not built for it anymore. I wouldn’t be the best at academics like I used to be, and this time, I was okay with it.

For so long, my one source of self-worth came from academic gratification. I was known for being the smart one. I was afraid that losing out on that would, well, leave me useless and shattered.

Now, none of that mattered anymore. I was content. I didn’t need to be the topper of the class to feel confident in my own skin. For the first time, studying wasn’t a competition, a burden, or a way to prove something.

It’s not like I was completely aloof from academics. There were subjects I liked, topics I knew I wanted to explore deeper, but spending hours and hours on it alone, miserable, in my room, just to get a better grade? This was something I did not want to do again, ever.

The pressure was gone. No one cared how many marks I could squeeze or how many hours I was grinding. There were no more eyes, there was no storm anymore. And in that stillness, something gentle began to shift. When I did feel like studying, it wasn’t out of fear or obligation. It was because I truly wanted to understand, to follow my curiosity. And slowly, I began to fall in awe. Not with the grind of academics, but with the quiet wonder of late-night Wiki spirals. Info dumping myself with, well, anything that came to mind.

(I ain’t talking about college stuff here, hell nah, that’s in gods hands now, man. I rage quit long ago)

FREE TSHIRTS!!!

I fumbled a lot through the year (obviously), but in hindsight, I can’t really remember any of the pull-through clutches or the aura losses <except MP elections, we don’t talk about that>
All I see now is a different me. Just barely different from what I was when I came here.

Somewhere along the way, I learnt the small small everyday things.

I learnt to scam sports attendance, steal plates from the mess, pacify an angry Sculpture Sir so he wouldn’t fail me, talk my way past the security guards while stealing chairs from auditoriums, and design t-shirts and get them for free, just to postpone doing the laundry by one day.

I have learnt now to get things done. I learnt to push through even if I was only being held together by duct tape and god’s grace <shoutout to god>. I learnt shortcuts not only from people, but from panic. Messing up, sludging through the fire and then eventually figuring it out and saving myself, even if just barely. I was my own knight (in the shining armour that was ChatGPT <shoutout to AI>).

College has taught me a lot in just a year. I learnt to let go and to let loose, be happy with what little I had.

Yes, I didn’t get into my dream college. Yes, I couldn’t chase the perfect CG. But I found something far rarer. Real, raw happiness. This wasn’t Plan A, but As are cringe anyways.

Footnotes

For all legal purposes >///<: This is just my experience. College life is ultimately what you make of it.I do not recommend the last night cram method. It is not sustainable. I am only surviving due to sheer luck and God’s grace.

If you’re a prof reading this: Hi sir/ma’am! This was 90% comedic relief, I mummy swear. Please employ me.