Not a lot of college experiences deserve the right to be written down or published. Even a mere suggestion that this one does would be profoundly conceited and the author is traumatized at even the thought of making any such claim. His opinions, on the contrary, suggest that this experience, or any for that matter, is of absolutely no use for the targeted readers. He is convinced that the readers will have their own, totally independent and unrelated experiences at the end of their four years (irrespective of whether they choose to or not). Nonetheless, the author has faithfully pondered upon his compulsions for writing the same. If the fact that the author personally knew the publishers of this website is subtly ignored, he concludes it as his fortuitous chance to record the significant (if any) experiences of last his four years and attain some self-validation.

Any experience of this nature could either be an elaborate list-of-contents or the epilogue of a book that hastily tries to conclude everything. Given my personal dislike for lists and also the fact that my college life was, proverbially, a lot more interesting in my head than in the objective reality (if anything like that exists), I plan to write it as a concluding account of everything that I experienced over the past few years.

During the initial days, right at the beginning of the first year, one feeling that I probably shared with a lot of people was how different college was from everything that we had expected it to be. It could either have been liberating or depressing (based on personal taste), but it did not fail to surprise us with new possibilities. Surrounded by a group of ambitious colleagues, or menacing buffoons (again, based on personal taste), it was also around this time that we had decided to shed the significance of a number that we so desperately wanted to associate with, our JEE ranks. The first year at IIT R, for me, is an after party for everyone who's missed the main one. Everyone is sober, wants to have fun but has no idea of what happens at a party and hence settles on trying out anything (or everything). Its primal manifestation takes place during the recruitment drives of campus groups. An overarching term used for every cultural, technical or sports student body, campus groups, are probably the boilerplates of social interactions during the initial years of undergrad, only second to hostel corridors. My recollections of this phase indicate that I ended up missing the after-party too. I had miserably failed to even attempt at getting flagged as a guitarist or a lead dancer and had settled for more trivial responsibilities. By the end of the first year, I found myself happily fulfilling the roles of an editor in a technical magazine and a developer in a software development group. Today, with the assistance of hindsight, I can firmly proclaim that my time spent as a member of these two groups was the most fruitful of all the ways I could have wasted time in college. Considering my complete ineptitude as a musician, my guitarist friend also agrees with me in this.

The sophomore year was a more mature and less frantic extension of the first year. With the euphoria finally settled in, it was the time when the discover-yourself part of college truly began. As far as my memory reminds me, I was not too concerned, at that time, about the future and naturally didn't even have a plan for the same. Most of my productive time got divided between academics, group projects, meetings and a fair bit of reading. The lack of an apparent 'greater' plan in my life meant that I had settled into a strategy of doing the basics right. Looking back, I find it to have been one of the significantly less bad decisions that I had taken in college. Not a lot of us know what we want to do in our lives right away. While it is important to be spontaneous and keep looking for things that interest us, a regard for the fundamentals only provides with the firm footing required for the big leap.

Webster's dictionary defines the word "culmination" as the highest or climatic point of something. It is also the one that I have ended up choosing to qualify my pre-final year at college; from an exhaustive set that also contained phrases like when-shit-hit-the-fan or when-everything-went-lord-of-the-flies. At the very beginning of third year, I had already concluded the internship season with a decent, but a personally bizarre internship in my hand. I had become the President of one of the campus groups I was a part of and had started leading another project that necessitated a lot of administrative dealings. All this meant that my days were devoid of any personal time and space, something that I had so dearly enjoyed until then. A bump in social and professional commitments and the consequent lack of time meant that my way of dealing with things became more reactive than proactive. All this ensured that my first lessons in leadership were bitter-sweet, as every meaningful experience should be. The subsequent end of third-year indicated the subsiding of all this workload. I joined my internship with a mixed bag of emotions and some dire uncertainties. Contrary to my expectations the internship proved to be a very exciting and fruitful time. The breadth of the domain in which I was working helped me demarcate things I liked from the ones that I did not. My incumbent need for a coherent story meant that I was consistently asking questions and looking for their answers. By the end of the summer, I had an intricately chalked out plan for my final year and also for the phase that followed. It is also this profusion of experiences from my pre-final year that makes me so grateful to IIT Roorkee till today. It is not that the only embodiment of success lies in the faces of victories. It is also during the furious fixing of everything broken, during the moments of great stigma and self-doubts that we find the plot-lines to our stories. These moments are sometimes not the ones that are full of accolades but the ones that we can call as our bravest.

The arrival of the final year meant that the feared and adored placement season was also coming. Apart from being everything that it is, for anyone who has been a part of it, the placement season is a manifestation of the indomitable spirits of friendship and cooperation. The flocking of the entire LHC with batches of students and the exaltation received at the placement of that one friend somewhat dwarves our own personal stories and relieves them from being mentioned here. What follows this is probably a celebration of everything that these four years have been. The quintessential bachelor's theses projects are somewhat dwarfed by the farewell parties and euphoria breaks the cycle of routine. It is the inevitability of end and the suspense of what lies ahead that probably forces us to be as young as we could ever be. With a book shared here and few gratitudes exchanged there, college ends, almost abruptly.

I had personally wanted college to conclude itself the moment I finally moved out its gates. Unlike a book that reveals itself at the end, reality generally becomes a story that continues. In friendships that get four years to thrive or in prejudices and habits that develop in this phase, college becomes a part of you. It is ironic how each life lived is just one of the million other possibilities and yet how successful it is in affecting our identities and personas. I find myself inept to draw any other conclusions at this point. I can only remind myself that hindsight is generally cursed with crude romanticization and every story appears perceivable when dealt backwards.