I am writing this blog before the day of my last exam of the first year. I am pursuing my BTech in AIML. Although I am having no interest in AIML still I am pursuing it with the hope that I will build some interest during these 4 years.
This blog is going to be different from my other blogs as I will be sharing my own experience during the first year of college and how it helped me in tech. For a note, I was into tech even before entering college. I was already into full stack web development and was working on building a startup as a freelancer from scratch.
For a snap, in this blog, I will be sharing about how my trajectory about development got changed positively. How I turned from an aimless developer to a direction.
The best phase (first month)
I think this is the delusional phase for a student when he enters college. It was the best phase of my first year. Interacting with a lot of folks, getting their viewpoint, doing fun, no studies, making new friends, making promises, building WhatsApp groups and many many things😂😂.
But as I told I was building my startup at that moment and I was also doing DSA so things were seeming stuck. After a long 3-months vacation, I was managing all the things together. So I decided to take things slow and while I doing I just skipped DSA(not recommended).
The situation or the time frame was much more fast-paced but I enjoyed it except the week while registration was going on.
College Attendance and Academics
I think this is the funniest and most useless part of any college. 75% attendance seriously 🥺. I was having only 5% attendance during 11th and 12th standard still I was able to secure good grades.
At first, when I listened to that rule and got the brief of college academics, it felt like a nightmare. The reason for which I took AIML was not to study those subjects what a fate I studied those subjects only in my first year.
Literally, I was doing carpentry. No CS subjects WoW!
I planned to stop all my work and I will study for exams right from the beginning and will be maintaining 90% attendance in my first sem 😑 . But dreams stayed dreams.
Students were fighting for attendance 🤣
College Community , Seniors and connections
I don't know about other colleges but I got some nice seniors. I got well accustomed to them, build some nice connections and started considering them as my true guide. And they actually helped me a lot in my journey.
I joined a college community and during the community interaction when I introduced myself all the members got impressed and some seniors pinged to know more about the project I was working on and to have a chat.
They gave me the true picture of college and I am following that till today.
At that time I was having no aim. I knew what I was doing and knew some great tech and could build possibly what I wanted but I was having no direction.
I got introduced to open source and community building. Although I am a newbie in this field but I like this a lot. I did my internship from a well-established startup and also did freelancing but the passion that I found in open source was best among the all. And for a note, my DSA was dangling.
Internship Craze
Students were dying to do internships even unpaid internships. They were not bothered about their skills but they wanted to internships. Well I guess this is a very wrong decision. Some even were posting their career update as "Intern At Asansol Engineering College". I was just shocked.
My First Interview and DSA
It was the moment when I realised the importance of DSA. When I sat on my first interview , the first question they asked was a basic DSA question. And I was like.... Although they selected based on my development skills and projects and headed to the next round and I even cleared and selected as a backend dev intern but I started taking DSA seriously.
Techs and Some Achievements
Well! thanks for keeping the patience. I spent my first mostly on polishing my existing skills and I did it upto a mark and of course it is an endless journey. While learning some tech I just took a project-based approach. I learnt docker and aws while deploying my startup. I learnt react native , sanity io , firebase, supabase, websockets, fast api , redux toolkit and zustand while building my apps and during a hackathon.
In DSA, I just try to solve 1 - 2 questions everyday but if I am not able I don't regret but whenever I am practicing it I just make it sure I understand it to the utmost.
If I talk about achievements, I won and secured at top 15 in 2 to 3 hackathons both in inter-college and national level. Also I lost one hackathon still our presentation was best. Also I tried node mcu and hardware modelling.
I became a part of communites and also started my own community "AEC DevSoc"
Exams
Make sure you start studying before 2weeks of exam. Attendance and colleges is not related to exam. I got some good grades in my first sem and I don't know about my second sem.
Conclusion
Things went both in good and bad ways. Learned a lot. Throughout this journey, the thing that was difficult for me was my poor mental health. I was just screaming while handling all this pressure. I was just a kid and the first 3 weeks felt like hell. Also, I made some really good connections and also lost some friends.
But the confidence I got after all this is of the next level. The best way to deal with any problem is just to face it. In the end you will definitely come up with some solution.
Last but not least there are no shortcuts. Just keep on going. And if you are a developer just remember "The battle is with yourself only".