Do Not Undervalue Yourself for an IIT

My IIT story isn’t the typical one about a guy who couldn’t make it to one of IITs but, still, managed to woe the world with his extraordinary achievements later in future. So to say, your expectation of an enthralling inspirational read may not be met here—but inspiration does not wait for achievements always.

I seriously had no doubt ever on getting into one of my favorite IITs. I was called a genius by all my neighbors, which also made me feel like I was a young avatar of Albert Einstein. I would spend most of my time coaching kids in various subjects in my locality. Their parents would derive inexpressible pleasure seeing their toddlers learning under my guidance.

I was an ordinary oily faced guy who enjoyed eating curd with rice. My specs too contributed a lot in giving me an overall look of an IIT engineer. Without any difficulty and, obviously, depression, I topped my 10^th grade.

You may think that when everything was going so good in favor of my IIT dream then what went wrong later?

I won’t exaggerate it and say that I simply procrastinated. In my view, procrastination is just like a credit card, which is fun until you get its bill. But I was still going great towards my IIT dream. I was studying 5 hours a day 5 days a week. And nothing on earth could keep me off my dream those days.

But suddenly during my 11^th and 12^th grades, I developed interest for debating, reading novels, and playing my favorite games. I would spend hours playing Football Manager. In the meanwhile, JEE started approaching closer but I did not care a bit. As a result, I wasn’t even close to the rankings.

I did not even write AIEEE exams. Finally, I had to join Anna University, a state-owned university in Tamilnadu, to please my parents proud.

My obsession with IITs didn’t last too long. I don’t even regret it. My point is that there’s life beyond IIT too. You don’t have to be an IITian always to be a famous person or earn lucrative pay packages.

I read it somewhere that IIT Bombay is the world’s 36^th best institution for higher education. It is also the best IIT in India. But nobody bothers to consider other institutions in Asia that are far better than IITs. We just want to get into IITs blindly without even checking out what is happening. We are all following a trend set by a few elites blindly.

For example, I heard it somewhere that Narayan Murthy’s son couldn’t crack JEE. But, obviously, for him life did not end there. He joined Cornell University, which ranks better than all IITs.

Just because more people prefer IITs doesn’t IITs better than other reputed institutions for higher education. Quantity doesn’t necessarily mean quality.

I am not blurting it out at you out of my frustration of not making it to any IIT. Of course, things would’ve been different for me if I would’ve made it to IIT. But I’m not disappointed at all. I am satisfied with my career even now. In fact, I am more than happy for not skipping things I enjoyed more than studying for IIT. I realized it later that my interest was in other things that I enjoyed doing more than preparing for engineering.

I am also satisfied because I didn’t cheat myself for four years of life in IIT only to realize eventually that what I’ve learned doesn’t excite me.

A great milestone in my career is foresighted even though I didn’t get into IIT. I will perhaps have a startup soon and IITians will vie for opportunities in it.
This post was contributed by Alok kumar Singh,askiitians