The Story Of My Engineering Life
Every person has a story to tell but not everyone realises if their story is going to get an audience large enough or if their story is worth listening to . My name is Amrit Ashu, I am a final year student at RV College Of Engineering in Bangalore , and this is my story. The story of a lost, under-confident kid from a small township in Jharkhand who went to attend his college in Bangalore unaware of the world around functions to leaving the college as a humble, curious and confident person who wanted to create his own path to a world that he operated , on his terms.
I came to Bangalore as a 17 year old kid from Bokaro Steel City, a small town in Jharkhand.After searching for the list of best engineering colleges in India numerous times, my father decided upon RVCE. I entered the 63 acre campus with my father constantly asking me if I would be able to live alone, and me, constantly giving him a concerned look.There were students all around , some coming out from classes conversing with teachers, some mingling with their friends , some sitting alone fallen deep into their thoughts. As I saw them I wondered, which of the these categories would I fall into.
When I entered the hostel and saw my room, I was horrified, a room where 3 beds would fit with great difficulty. A hospital bed lookalike was allotted to me as well and there were two other room mates , one from Karnataka and the other from Andhra Pradesh.The first question that came to my mind was how would I mingle with two people from completely different cultures speaking different languages, but then as destiny is, that was the beginning of a never-ending friendship.
I had earlier heard a lot of negativity about mess food and was very worried about it as well, when I tasted Set dosa for the first time, I felt that mess food is not that bad. It is just that when you get habituated to one kind of food , you get bored of it. My father gave me an important advice after tasting the food, he told the food that does not taste great is usually very healthy . It was a great day, got an opportunity to meet lot of new people, people who came from various parts of the country. The next day was our first class, all excited I went to class, it didn’t take me long to understand that there was a huge diversity of students, in terms of culture, in terms of financial background, and definitely in terms of interest towards engineering.
We met a few seniors, gave introductions, got to understand how to make fun of each other and how to defend ourselves, some of the important learnings of engineering came from these introductions. Exams were always a special part, completing a syllabus taught for 4 months in a single night was something we considered ourselves proud of . Earlier everyone used to be worried about the marks and GPA, but with time we understood that GPA was just an eligibility barrier for placements and higher education and was its role was restricted to these two only.
I took part in lot of extra curricular activities, be it street plays, case studies, playing cricket or making business plans. Entrepreneurship Cell played a big role in my personality development, it is the cell that taught me leadership skills, it changed me as a person, I , who was shy to speak in front of a group of people was now giving motivational speeches in front of a houseful crowd, this is where I learnt that the major part of my life would be about the people in my life and how important networking with right set of people would be.I was fortunately made the president of the entrepreneurship cell in my pre-final year and it gave me the best memories of my college, having a team that worked so hard that it was awarded the best E-cell in the country by IIT Bombay to organising South India’s largest and RVCE’s first ever E-summit, it was here that I learnt to strive for winning wherever and whenever possible. In my final year in college came 8th Mile, our annual techno-cultural fest, I was privileged enough to be made the head of the festival, and we were told that the college management would not be supporting the fest financially and even before beginning our work we were told that we had to pay dues of the previous festival.Owing to the responsibilities, we gave our 100% and did one of the best festivals ever with the team raising more than 43 lakhs on its own amidst demonetisation and a financial year closing.
Cricket was a special bond, from seeing Sachin retire to watch Virat take on the world, college life gave it all.Our particular group of friends always had a team, on two particular occasions I was fortunate enough to win the game for the team, one on the last ball and the other with the last wicket, both of which are special moments that will go on with me.
When I look back in time, I see that good times fly by, these moments of my college life would be the stories I would be telling my future generations. And unsurprisingly, the same stories would be told again and again whenever my friends get together.
The most important part of college was the friends you make, you won’t get to know when friends turn into family, you will meet different kinds of people, people who will use you for their benefit, people who would show lot of arrogance in their behaviour, people who would always be humble and respectful to you, in the end what will matter will be the friends you choose, your decisions in life will highly be affected by them, it is these friends who will make college a home away from home.
There are few things that I would like to tell people who would be joining college soon, choose the college wisely and the course even more wisely, use websites like Entranceplus to get a knowledge of college rankings and what are the courses they offer, do not take up any course just because your parents want you to, choose what interests you.Once you join college, try and explore every possible activity, as there are lot of things unexplored for you, which you consider that you are not good at but that judgement comes to you as you have never tried it before, never be afraid of experimenting, you do not know what lies ahead, find your passion, and keep exploring until you don’t find it, and once you find it, don’t leave it, because somewhere down in time life will give you an option between stability and greatness, you should be prepared choose the latter , people who have chosen stability have never left an impact on society, be kind, try to help others, everyone loves themselves but not everyone has the courage to love others , be remembered for who you are and what you have done for others, don’t just be another brick in the wall. The most important thing would be finding yourself, if you have found that, then any course, any stream, any profession would be easy to choose because you will always have a clear set of factors while choosing them.
As I leave college, I understand a lot of things I wouldn’t as a fresher , I take with me a million moments filled with joy, sadness, happiness and especially nostalgia, I believe in myself now, I know my strengths and weaknesses, I know my path and I do believe that one day I shall make a dent in the universe.
Concluding with Steve Jobs’s words “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.Stay Hungry,Stay Foolish”.
