End of an Era
I was a student at FIITJEE Jaipur since class 10th for 3 years. I devoted myself to one goal cracking JEE so that I could work on computers. I was fascinated by Excel, operating systems, browser scripts, video games and more. I was able to clear many competitive exams throughout the journey but let’s begin with the day of JEE Advanced.
As usual, my father dropped me off at the exam centre Anand Engineering University with the necessary stationery and some chewing gums. I went for paper 1, took a good nap in the car under the shade of a nearby tree during break and then gave my paper 2.
The Head of Centre at FIITJEE Jaipur, Dhruv Kumar Banerjee (DKB) Sir called in to check on how did it go for us, I gave a pretty generic answer of “haan acha hogaya sir”.
On returning back home I moved up all the study material (the real one) into the storage room, sat down on my PC and remixed a power rangers theme song on Virtual DJ.
Chemistry 🧪 Olympiad
The learning never stops, next stop for me was Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, Mumbai as a part of the OCSC Training Camp for the International Chemistry Olympiad. Packed with me was my Clayden I took the flight.
With hopes high to represent India 🇮🇳 I joined the camp. With me was Madhav Mittal, my fellow batchmate from FIITJEE. Rest everyone was a high stakeholder over there, the soon to be AIR 2: Himanshu, 2 times gold medalist: Dhyey Gandhi, AIR 3: Archit for Physics Camp. It was pretty daunting at first to meet them all.
The camp started in the Humid ☔ Weather of Mumbai, I used to spend my time in lecture by esteemed professors, in labs, evening in the library and then back to my room. Even before joining college, I used to sleep 💤 through those lectures because, in the end they were still profs who don’t try to make things interactive and just bombard you with knowledge. As a welcome gift we were given Atkins’ Physical Chemistry.
The food in the mess over there was just delicious 😋, the library was just excellent and at least the lecture halls were air-conditioned, I thought to myself “so IITs would be similar to this it would be fine I could survive.”
Even though my basic theory was good, I never really did experiments in school, so I bombed the practicals with zero final product 🧫 and was not selected for the final team of 5 people.
So back to Jaipur now after this bittersweet experience.
The D-Day
My father had calculated my score for me as I was at the camp when answer key came and I didn’t want my score to impact the camp. It was calculated somewhere around 250 which was incorrect didn’t know this initially. Started pouring in the marks v/s rank :sports_medal: for some based on this I was supposed to get a rank of around 300. The site wasn’t working as usual.
The truth unveiled itself in the evening at 5’o clock. My result was a 222 marks and an AIR 598. It was a moment of disbelief for me as it was nowhere close to what dad miscalculated, my babosa (grandfather) was around then. He told me “udaas hone ki zaroorat nahi hai 1 lac bachon mein aayi hai yeh rank”, I really felt good, yeah this isn’t bad at all 😃. So, time to head over to FIITJEE JLN for celebration now.
JOSAA
Begins the search for the right branch and institute combination. I knew that I wanted to pursue Computer Science 💻 although since the top 7 closed down at 594 last year I had to reconsider. My seniors from FIITJEE who were in IIT Madras CSE told me it’s okay even if I take EEE there just will have to put in effort from my side to cover CS. Then some told me to consider ECE 5 year at IIT KGP.
Finally I talked to Akarsh Goyal bhaiya (currently at Cohesity) he told me to consider IIT BHU if I wanted to pursue CSE as their coding culture is good. So begins my search about BHU, having read about good placements 1 Crore, coding culture and contacting a member of TPC at that time Aditya Bhaiya in his words “ajaa bhai sab acha hai” I finally decided to fill in BHU as a probable good option. Also was really sorry to IIT G seniors whom I bothered comparing BHU to G which was totally wrong and unfair at that time.
I filled in 19 choices in JOSAA Top 7 CSE and MNC 4 year along with BHU and Dhanbad CSE, locked in. Finally I was offered IIT BHU CSE 4 year B.Tech. Without even thinking about floating the option as I was that sure about BHU, I locked my choice at IIT Delhi and went on the 12 days tour of Europe ✈️✈️