Those were the days

I was tasked last week with writing a letter to my 17 year old niece who is graduating high school and leaving for college this Fall. I thought long and hard about what to say and finally wrote a few heartfelt lines for her. She has a good head on her shoulders and will undoubtedly be fine and do really well academically and socially, and my advice was mainly about taking care of herself and enjoying the journey.

Anyway, that said, this task took me back to thinking about some of my own college experiences. Here’s a glimpse!

• I can now admit unabashedly that I followed a boy to college! And a terrible one at that. Yes, I actually based my entire life’s choice on where I would go to college and what I would study based on the fact that this silly high school boyfriend (HB) was going here. Thankfully, we broke up within a month of starting college and were in different branches of engineering. It still made for irritating canteen bump-ins and uncomfortable “hellos” through the four years. I cannot advise other people not to do this, as I again did this for my masters (this time though choosing to follow the husbadoo , then boyfriend to the US),and I don’t regret it. In retrospect, if I hadn’t followed HB to this college, I would never have met the husbadoo and so maybe all is well.

• I was in a branch of engineering that had very few girls. The boys and girls in our class did not talk for the first few months . After that, interactions started in pockets – mainly for copying assignments! I was a part of a group of four girls, all pretty similarly raised and similar in outlook, (very important to note as we basically did not relate to about 70% of our class in anyway) and we spent the better part of the first two years looking at other more “hep” branches where the boys and girls ate lunch together wondering if we would ever be friends with a small sub set of boys in the class.  Oh and no love interests in the class at all, this was purely from a platonic stand point. At the end of maybe 3 years, this eventually did happen and we have had maybe one or two group lunches. I know such a “non – big deal” in other colleges and courses maybe but biggish here.

• Assignments! We were in a field that had a lot of engineering drawing – almost three years of it. So these massive sheets required a lot of time and effort. Usually one person in the class came up with the design, mostly picked up from seniors work from years past and the entire class would make copies of the sheet at the copy shop conveniently located across campus. As this massive sheet ended up as maybe 16 A4 sized sheets, you then took the copies home and drew out your own sheet. I have personally not done a glass trace as the apparatus of a glass top table and light below the table were not easy to set up at my place, but I must have been in the minority.

• The food! The canteen was after all a government college canteen, so prices were quite low on almost all things there. The Rs. 15 grilled sandwich was maybe the most expensive thing or the Rs. 17 Schezwan fried rice in a scary bright orange which usually two people or four shared. So your pocket money usually went a long way. A Rs 2.50 vada pav and cutting chai for I think Rs. 1.50 were a staple. There were more expensive places we went to around campus though to break this monotony. Oh and all of us brought our dabbas to college, we would usually end up eating those at 11 am and then hit the canteen later in the day. Basically a lot of food through the day.

• The yearly college fest ! Where do I start? Firstly there was a rope separating the boys and girls, so that no funny business happened. Of course, it did outside the college and other parts of the college that were not roped off. Each department had a fashion show and ours was usually the most awful. We girls showed up to see hot guys and slutty girls from other departments and in four years never once participated in our own department’s show. During the first two years our aim was to escape being roped into this and making fools of  ourselves on stage.This involved stressful situations and frustrating our seniors who worked hard to recruit people for this show. The latter two years, we blissfully were not even prodded to participate and didn’t bother to organize anything at all.

• Sports days and mandatory girl sporting events – box cricket , basket ball were all terribly humiliating again. None of the girls in our department played a single sport decently. But we had to play these to uphold the department’s honor so to speak and I have vivid memories of awful basketball games were maybe one girl on our side knew how to even dribble the ball. (And no, that wasn’t me. I really suck at most sports.) So we used to have a huge audience , mostly irritating boys roaring in laughter during our games. Maybe I give ourselves too much credit, that they were there to see our miserable on field performance. They were probably there to see the hot little IT girls we sometimes had to play againstJ

• Exams and results results! College seemed so hard when I was in it. I kept thinking I was a misfit for the course and I think I am still the worst engineer in existence but the one thing I did know to do was work hard. Looking back, I read the prescribed books, notes, learnt how to design stuff that I had no interest in  (You can look up  mould design or jig design , to get an idea) and did quite well in all the courses.

In our engineering courses, if you attempted a paper for 100 marks, you would definitely pass with maybe scoring somewhere in the 60s. God help you if you ended up not preparing and had to attempt any lesser.  If you only attempted 80% of the paper, you probably might be border line pass or fail at 40%. In short, there was a huge disparity between what you wrote and what you scored. And results would come a good month after the next semester started. So someone would find out the results were coming out that afternoon. The rest of the day would be spent in fervent prayer. And finally the administrative laddie would come out with a huge roll of results and put them on the notice board for all to see . And you would scramble to find your name and heave a sigh of relief at passing. In the first two years, invariably, someone you knew wouldn’t pass and would get a “KT”. You would then spend the next few hours trying to commiserate with that friend. By the third year, everyone seemed to have got their act together on how to study and these situations were very few.

• The gossip, the professors, the fear! Ours was a smallish department where everyone knew about everyone’s business. When the husbadoo and I started dating each other in our final year, I had major freak outs about the profs finding out about us. The repercussions could range from them calling your parents to being failed in your vivas. So I lived in fear for the most part. But I guess they probably did know  but nothing was really done about it, thankfully. We invited these profs to our wedding too a few years down the line!

Writing this and reminiscing makes me miss college. I am barely in touch with a handful of people from the so called “group” I was in. Most of my classmates are on my Facebook and it’s amusing to see pictures of weddings first and now children starting to pop up.

I remember when I was in college; I was always more stressed than I should have been. I made a huge deal of every single assignment, social event, exam, result declaration, boy trouble – all of it.  But somewhere in between all this, I guess I was having a good time!