Before starting this is my first post here so don't mind it.

First few months

Honestly, it was exciting I didn't study after 2 years of excessive studying jee stuff. Basically roamed around i campus, tried different things, talked random shit, made whatsapp groups, made a few friends, participated in hackathons and relaxed in life. 😂😂 On the other hand I was thinking of startups and learning aws, firebase, and networking for the same.

Studied a day before exams( a mistake I realized which you shouldn't do) and enjoyed it a lot.

College Attendance

I think this was a paradox at least in our college I had been used to not having good attendance in 11 and 12 due to competitive exams but we had 75 % attendance 😥.

I use to literally go to lectures and learn stuff with Udemy and Coursera at the back of lecture halls in my college.

We had marks for attendance so yeah it was funny people were crazy just to attend classes even if they weren't mentally present there.😶

So, as a good student 😅 I thought of starting studying from starting in both semesters but dreams stayed dreams in the end.

Internship Craze

People were ready to do any type of internship literally unpaid and stuff so they could put " Worked at an intern in abc college" on their resumes instead of actually developing their skills first.

College and community

I liked had no idea at the beginning and without aim I used to work my way around when I met some nice seniors and joined a college community.

It was after that and some online people who I followed like Kunal Kushawa and with their guidance I saw that I got some aim and even went to join global communities and do open-source contributions. So, I did them and even worked at a small startup.

Tech and achievements

I dedicated myself to honing my technical skills while managing my academic workload. Despite the initial decline in motivation, I immersed myself in projects, including the development of a voice automatic recognition system.

My participation in three hackathons yielded impressive results, securing a runner-up position in one and ranking among the top 10 teams in the others. Along the way, I gained expertise in Docker, React, and prompts.

Conclusion

Had an exciting time learning and growing as well as forming new connections. It took a toll on my mental health in a very bad way honestly 🥱 but I steered through it. I made some good connections lost some friends and had an amazing year.

But on a serious note, the confidence I got 💪 and what I learned from it will stay with me forever. 🙂

To end this, I would say every day keep growing there are no shortcuts in life. Your only competition, in the end, should be yourself! 👍