"JEE Advanced fulfills dreams for a few, while shatters for the rest. For me it was a mixed bag."

With all my dreams and expectations, I entered into the new world of IIT Roorkee and was welcomed with a cumbersome registration process in the historical Convocation Hall. And before I was done with the registration process I met my first friend at IITR, a guy from Beed who became one of my best friends. What followed was a 7-day orientation program which showcased the prolific talent of IITR.

Like any other freshman, I was allotted Rajendra Bhawan for a year to live in. I was allotted a single room and my mom helped me clean the room and set up everything. With this, my life at IITR began. I tried the mess food in the first week and left it henceforth. What came as a surprise was the creativity in food at canteens. I heard about eateries like Chola Samosa and fried Maggi for the first time, and boy it was delicious too! The food options are not limited to IIT itself, there are various dining options within a 1-2 km radius outside of IIT.

As time progressed, we got our LAN registered. The speeds at IITR was the fastest I had ever experienced. With speeds reaching 1Gbps, everything downloaded at an unimaginable pace, and I became addicted to the internet. Group recruitments started in mid-Aug, and like every other person I sought out to seek a group of my interest. After attending multiple intro talks, I stumbled upon Geek Gazette. The group intrigued me a lot and therefore I gave it a try at a field I had no idea about, edit. To my surprise, I got selected and my life took a sharp turn. I met some really amazing people, formed bonds and most of all I felt as if I was getting infinite chapos (IITR lingo for a treat). The group dynamics that prevailed inspired me and I got knowledge of something really geeky. I started hanging out more in search of similar people and socialized a lot in my first sem.

The lectures at first were quite interesting since I felt I was revisiting topics I covered while preparing for JEE, but soon enough they turned dull. I, therefore, started to not attend lectures. Proxies came into handy as time progressed and I started getting lazier by the day. I, however, was even more determined to discover more about my field and so I started disturbing my seniors with questions relating to tech in general. MTEs kicked in by now and I wanted to show my presence so I started studying a week before the exams (never to occur again). That's when I realized that you could end up getting GPL if you score decently.

At IIT, you cannot be at ease. With MTEs over Thomso preparations started. It was a really different experience, and I tried to extract as much of those 3-day extravaganzas as possible. It was the pronite that really ignited my interest. It was here when I realized that there is more to IIT than meets the eye. Once we were done with Thomso, my first big test of college life began. It was ACM ICPC, and while we were not ready, we gave our best shot. We bagged the top rank amongst freshmen and 19th at IITR. But now, I had to shift my mood from competitive programming since ETEs were nearby and I wanted a decent CGPA for what I had planned for the 2nd semester. During this time itself, SDSlabs (technical group at IITR) declared it's 2nd iteration of WoC (short for Winter of Code). Designed on the grounds of GSoC (short for Google Summer of Code), it was for enthusiasts interested in contributing to open source. This sent me into one of the worst dilemmas I'd faced in my IIT life thus far. At one end, my target was to crack GSoC itself, for I was really interested in writing code that mattered and on the other, WoC provided some really good experience and learning curve. With counseling from multiple people, I finally decided to skip WoC and looked into source code of Open Source Orgs. It was highly terrifying at once since I couldn't understand anything from the multimillion lines of code. I spent December learning as much about Nmap (the org I decided to contribute in) as I could. It was intriguing and exciting as to how they made ends meet.

With the new semester, came in new challenges and interests. Tech group recruitments began and I was taken aback as I had near to no web development experience. I knew basics of web dev that I learned during the first semester itself. With the meager knowledge I had, I couldn’t try for MDG (Mobile Development Group). So with all the resources I had, I went ahead gave a try at IMG (Information Management Group) and SDSlabs. Accepted by the former, I was glad to make it to one of the tech groups. I could not get into PAG (Programming and Algorithms Group) given my lack of interest in competitive programming by now. While I was glad to make it to one of the tech groups, I felt devastated for Nmap declared that it would not sign up for GSoC'18.

I developed a new interest in Parallel programming paradigm thanks to one of my friend, who started working on the Node.js framework. I explored the field wrt C++ and it got even more interesting. My interests in web development increased many folds as I joined IMG, where I was taught of web development practices. With the help of IMG folks, I revived my hope for another org, STE||AR GROUP. An org that provided with scalable parallel programming library written in C++. I introduced myself to the org and tried to contribute as well. With workloads from two groups, GSoC and academics, I was drowning with stress and constant deadlines that came by.

I stopped going to lectures by now just to save time. I focused everything on GSoC for an all or nothing gamble. I blew my MTEs so badly that even I could not comprehend my marks. But I kept calm and focused on GSoC and focused on my IMG assignments. A week before the ETE, GSoC results were announced and I got selected as a GSoC student. The feeling was overwhelming and I, therefore, turned to ETE just to improve my otherwise horrible grades. I wasn’t really able to save the semester, but what I learned from it was something that I’ll cherish in the future.

Time management is the key to everything. You can’t be at 10 places at once, neither can you learn everything in a short span. Stop copying others and find your own path to move on. Take it with a pinch of salt, for these words are coming from a 2nd yearite who has yet to learn a lot!