Natural Selection - Adapting when times get tough
A not so extraordinary story of my survival in the hyper-competitive IITs
In my last post I had opened up about my academic struggles in the initial years at IIT. The “Impostor Syndrome” had hit me hard: sitting with the best minds of the country in the same class, I was doubtful if I could hold my own amongst that group. I studied really hard in the first 1-2 years. My grades, however, turned out to be poor while also failing in a course (first time ever in my life). I remember crying that day.
The subsequent years, while I was still not at my best, I became progressively at ease with the circumstances. Scoring better with lesser efforts too.
What changed?
In the earlier post, I spoke about survival instincts kicking-in but didn’t really elaborate on that. I got feedback from a lot of people on diving into details in this part of my journey too. And so here I am writing a follow-up to the first blog piece.
I started to think deep as to what particularly had changed. I was just recounting things:
Friends - I had a good peer group (hostel friends/batchmates) some of whom were also having a hard time initially, just like me. And there is something about suffering together. It makes the actual suffering so much more bearable! Also everyone have their own ways of dealing with situations and some of them can be really helpful to you as well. We had top JEE (entrance exam for IITs) rankers in our class but NOT all of them carried in the same vein in college. And one of my friends, he always chose to look at those laggards. I remember the days when the exam mark sheets were distributed. He would come back from the class, mostly upbeat and tell about each and every top ranker who got screwed in the exam. His selective memory was amazing…as if he had memorised an excel sheet which had a filter applied: “Rank < 50 and Marks < X”. Now call us sadist, but it did make us feel better.
At some point a realisation hit that: “you can’t be a 9-pointer and that’s ok. even a 7-pointer is fine”. I shifted goal-posts and that really lifted a lot of pressure. That made me enjoy other aspects of hostel life too. In my first year, I never ever tried to take part in extra-currics. From my second year onwards, I started to represent my hostel team in Cricket (we won a Gold too that year!) and some other club activities here and there. It helped not focussing on academics all the time.
Shifting goal-posts isn’t always a great advice…but if you haven’t signed up for that goal in the first place then it maybe a good idea to shift
It was good to have my elder brother around in the campus. We had one year of campus life together. He was in his final year during my first year. And while he was much better than me academically, he certainly understood how overwhelming things can become especially when you are in “Compu department” (short for Computer Science department).
Big Bro and Me Doing all sorts of obscure courses (as part of optionals) in search of that elusive “Ikka” (A-grade). Will explain it further with an exaggeration but it will drive home this point. If somehow a mythical course like “How to Train a Dragon” would have found its way in IIT curriculum, we would have done it…provided the Prof was chill and it was easy to score grades in it!
As you can see, there were a combination of things that led to improved performance. Nothing extraordinary though. And frankly, neither did I achieve extraordinary results. So it makes sense.
Mine was no Rocky Balboa story there. In fact I feel Darwin’s theory of evolution would be a better theory to describe what changed. And even more specifically… “Natural Selection”.
Natural selection is a process that results in the adaptation of an organism to its environment by means of selectively reproducing changes.
The chameleon adopts to change his skin colour. He does not rises to the top of food chain with this but he does find a way to co-exist with his predators.