What I hate about my college life and what I don’t
I am a twenty-two year old, three-quarters through a BTech programme in Information Technology, at a centrally funded autonomous technical institution, in India. I am barely creative on a clean slate; I am, however, good at picking up procedural skills quickly.
Since childhood, I’ve been interested in figuring out how things work — I grew up from unscrewing toys to dismantling and reassembling desktops, laptops, and smartphones. In the latter half of my school life, I’d return home and watch shows like "Mega Factories" and "How It’s Made".
At thirteen or fourteen, I figured out why I was bad at drawing — I never felt connected with creating 2D art, because I couldn’t interact with it. I’ve loved interaction throughout, so much so, that my favourite toys were remote controlled vehicular toys — I wanted to be in control. Very soon, I began creating 3D models on my computer, using a software called "SketchUp", which I use to this day. Many people enjoy reading books, but since I am devoid of any literary sense, I never read books. I rather explored an encyclopaedia software called "Encarta", and a picture book called "Ultimate Visual Dictionary", bought for me in 2008, which I still keep in my bookshelf-cum-study-table.
During my school years, there was a lot I wanted to learn, practice, and create. It was so bad that I’d go to internet cafés and study about engines, transmission, aerodynamics, etc. But, I was somehow convinced that it wasn’t time for those things, which I now believe was a wrong decision.
Fast forward to 2016: I was appearing for entrance examinations with near-zero preparation, even after being enrolled into one expensive cram-school programme; reappeared in 2017 with almost zero improvement, and after wasting some more money and time: fared worse. I somehow made into just another "Government Funded Technical Institute (GFTI)", with an extremely poor rank; barely made into the closing cutoff rank (GEN) of Information Technology.
I was just another average child with no idea about what I wanted out of life. The connotion of IITs appeared rosy because of all wrong reasons. But, I was depressed, more so, because I was ambitionless. I joined college three years back, in an uninspiring place, as an average boy, with almost no explored skills, and without any credible achievements. Unfortunately, it is still quite the same, three years down.
I was mediocre and lacked a taste in art. As a younger me, my college dream was that I wouldn’t be judged based on my inabilities. But, my college constantly reminds me of my mediocrity, and the things I can’t do well. It doesn’t inspire me to explore new things; it makes me believe that I need a job to be successful, which I very well know I absolutely don’t.
There is an unending rat-race around — students are barely interested in what they do, everything just wants a job without knowledge of any proper reason. Everyone is obsessed about who they cracks an internship interview, or gets a higher job package. Nobody is bothered about how satisfied an individual is, or what someone wants in life. There is a great population who don’t belong or want to be there, yet are in, because society believes that getting a job is the only metric of success, and engineering is one easy way for it. Basically, society hasn’t passed the colonial era, and neither do they want to.
After years in dilemma, I figured out what I wanted — to create machines that’d augment our daily life, and interacting with which would be natural. I realised that society believes that education is a static portion of out lives, during which we are unweildy, and not an ever-existent gradual part of our daily. College neither helps in pushing me to follow my ambitions, nor does it help me grow.
College has unproductive lectures, which are restrictive, and has exams, which are too easy to ace with little to no effort. The worst part is that there is no perceived incentive in learning the contents of the syllabus, even though they are essential knowledge for an engineer. Ultimately, these engineering colleges, like mine, don’t produce engineers — they produce a bunch of unhappy misfits who gain nothing from the programme. Colleges like these are least bothered about the emotional failure.
One of my biggest complaints is that the course is inflexible — I’m never given the choice of papers I’d like to take, because they don’t teach a lot; whatever they teach, they like to proceed at their own slow pace. I believe that twelve weeks is a lot to gather good insight about a subject, but the speed kills everything. The argument will probably be that some students won’t be able to catch up with a higher speed, but the same becomes a bottleneck for every other student and prevents them from running faster. The syllabus is quite good, but the quantity of content is one-tenth of what I want. Hence, most of us, including me, study for just one night before each paper, and clear them with ease.
College has this absurd policy of mandatory attendance criterion, all along while the course is too light and the lectures aren’t discrete. My college life doesn’t have many people or activities that I can look up to. Why is getting a job an inspiration? The funny thing is that students don’t even want a job, they want to get hired: they’ve agreed to sell hours of their life so that they can retire in the rest. Will these people ever do anything productive for the community?
My college life doesn’t have any challenge or activities I want to participate in. There is no contest which pushes me to work harder, or helps me improve. My college life is full of people who are easily satisfied with substandard work and with their life, and don’t want to strive harder. Some students are worshipped for getting 'selected' in certain activities, and not for completing them. Why even worship? Students look at others by their only artificial metric of success and get demotivated, resulting in a herd-unhappiness.
My college life is gloomy, unchallenging, monotonous, and claustrophobic. And, I hate all about it.
