I love quotes and many have shaped how I think, how I respond to situations and most importantly how I find happiness within. I stumbled upon the following Quora answer which serves the purpose of a quote too:

What are some good pieces of advice that most college students are not ever likely to hear?

“Don’t be proud of your college. Make your college proud to have you.”

-Answered by Debarghya Das (as of Oct. 2018, he works at Google)

It is a very precise answer and many students who come from good colleges can relate to what Debarghya is trying to say. Almost all BITSians (including me) at one point or the other had this feeling when we entered BITS Pilani, a Tier 1 college in India, that “this is it”. But sooner some realized that its not entirely upto the college to get a high paying job for you, pay your tuition loan or make you a fantastic artist/engineer/leader/XYZ person. The sooner that realization comes the better. I am very fortunate to have studied at BITS Pilani not because its a Tier 1 college but because I got five years of wonderful lifetime experience.

  • I met some fantastic folks of my age,
  • I got to live in Pilani’s extreme climate conditions ranging from 40 degrees in summer to less than 10 degrees in winter,
  • I was mentored by some of the coolest professors, and
  • I found awesome friends for life.

Short update:

I just completed my first data driven project at the Delaval (the company where I am working as a Data Scientist). I got to implement and deliver a full-fledged product backed by AI. It was a very exciting and ambitious project and would help to make the dairy farms across the world more intelligent. I experienced a whole new level of Python, TensorFlow and deployment techniques which I wasn’t knowing before. Good to have these things under my belt!

Coming back to the answer, I am just an ordinary alumnus of my college and don’t know if I made my college proud to have me but definitely, my college has made me a better person, a better thinker, a better collaborator, a tough survivor in terms of living conditions and most importantly a better version of myself what I was five years ago.