My Life at IIT Jammu: Countless Lessons

Walking through the gates of an IIT for the first time felt surreal—like stepping into a world I had admired from a distance for years. After grinding through diploma labs, building solo projects late into the night, and navigating an unconventional path, I had finally arrived. But very quickly, I realized that getting in wasn’t the finish line—it was the starting point of something even more challenging, more humbling, and ultimately, more transformative. This wasn’t just a shift in location—it was a shift in mindset, culture, and pace.

⚙️ The Culture Shock

The moment I stepped onto the IIT campus, I felt both excitement and unease settle in. I had made it through the entrance gates—something I’d worked hard for—but once inside, it became clear that this was an entirely new world. The pace was faster. The conversations were deeper. The students around me seemed to breathe algorithms and quote research papers in casual hallway chats. Coming from a diploma background where I was mostly self-driven and project-focused, I suddenly found myself surrounded by peers who had already dabbled in competitive programming, cracked Olympiads, and contributed to open-source projects.

The pressure wasn't just academic—it was cultural. The way people collaborated, the tools they used, the depth of discussions around every subject—it felt like I was dropped in the middle of an ongoing sprint. Everyone had a head start. Even in casual settings like hostel rooms or mess hall tables, the buzz revolved around internships, CP ratings, GitHub contributions, and research paper submissions. It was intimidating, to say the least. I remember questioning whether I could keep up, or if I had somehow taken a wrong turn in reaching here.

But amidst that discomfort, I also found motivation. The culture that initially overwhelmed me started to push me forward. I began to observe and learn—how people organized their time, the resources they used, and the depth with which they approached problems. Slowly, I stopped comparing and started absorbing. That shift was key. The culture shock didn’t disappear overnight, but I began to see it less as a threat and more as an opportunity—to evolve, to rise, to become sharper, faster, better.

First week—overwhelmed but inspired

🧠 Learning, Relearning, and Unlearning

Studying at an IIT isn’t just about piling on new information—it’s about fundamentally changing how you think. In my first year, I had to confront a truth I hadn’t fully expected: much of what I had learned before had to be reshaped, challenged, and in some cases, unlearned altogether. Concepts I once believed I understood were revisited in more rigorous, mathematical, and system-level contexts. Programming wasn’t just about writing code that worked—it was about writing code that scaled, that conformed to standards, that performed efficiently across edge cases I hadn't previously considered.

Take data structures and algorithms, for instance. Back in my earlier studies, I had approached them in a very task-oriented manner—learn it to get the project done. But here, I was being forced to understand the “why” behind the “how.” Why does a heap work the way it does? What happens at the memory level when recursion goes too deep? Why do we study amortized time complexities, and when do those really matter in practice? These weren’t just academic questions—they were the core of how IIT trained us to think.

What also surprised me was how often learning came from peers rather than professors. Late-night hostel discussions, collaborative group projects, and debugging marathons taught me more about resilience and structured problem-solving than some lectures. I learned to approach problems from multiple angles, not just the one that first came to mind. I learned to communicate my logic clearly when pair programming or explaining my thought process. And sometimes, I had to let go of methods I had become comfortable with—because there was a cleaner, faster, or more elegant way just waiting to be discovered.

This cycle of learning, relearning, and unlearning was humbling. But it also made every small victory—every passing test case, every optimized algorithm, every ‘Aha!’ moment—that much more meaningful. It reminded me that growth isn’t always about adding more. Sometimes it’s about stripping things down, questioning the obvious, and rebuilding from the ground up.

Not just classes—learning happens everywhere

🔬 Beyond the Classroom

One of the biggest revelations of studying at an IIT was how much learning happens outside the classroom. While lectures and assignments form the academic backbone, the real heartbeat of the campus is in its dynamic extracurricular life. There’s a kind of magic in wandering into a student club meeting late in the evening, ending up in a spontaneous whiteboard discussion about quantum computing, or finding yourself pulled into a hackathon team that was formed hours before the deadline. It’s a place where curiosity doesn’t clock out when classes end—it expands into every corridor, every common room, every casual conversation.

In that environment, I found myself saying “yes” to things I wouldn’t have considered before. I joined technical clubs, attended research seminars, and sat through workshops that ran well past midnight. These weren’t just for résumé-building—they were playgrounds for exploration. I remember one particular workshop on open-source contributions where seniors broke down complex projects and showed us how to make our first pull request. That session demystified something I’d always found intimidating and opened a new door for me.

It was also outside the classroom that I explored areas beyond my embedded systems comfort zone—most notably, my venture into Low Resource NLP. It was a bold leap, one that pushed me into unfamiliar territory involving language models, datasets, and evaluation metrics I hadn’t worked with before. But it stretched me intellectually and showed me that interdisciplinary knowledge is not only valuable—it’s often necessary. I began to see how embedded systems and NLP could intersect, especially in constrained devices or edge computing applications.

Culturally, life beyond the classroom offered its own education. From the thrill of college fests and tech expos to the responsibility of managing student-led events, I learned time management, teamwork, and communication under pressure. These were not bullet points from a textbook—they were earned experiences that added dimension to who I was becoming.

IIT is more than an institute; it’s an ecosystem. And in that ecosystem, the classrooms are just a starting point. Real growth happens in the in-between spaces—in labs after hours, in shared hostel struggles, in spontaneous brainstorming sessions, and in the quiet confidence that builds when you take ownership of your learning journey.

One of those nights—Maggi, coffee, and campus.

📉 Failures, Deadlines & That One All-Nighter

Despite the structured timetables and endless planning, failure finds its way into every IIT student’s journey—and I was no exception. My first semester felt like I was constantly running, yet always two steps behind. Deadlines came faster than expected, concepts often took longer to internalize, and assessments rarely felt like fair tests of what I actually knew. I remember one particular assignment submission where I had misunderstood the core logic of the problem and ended up submitting a completely broken solution—hours of effort gone in the blink of a late-night evaluation email.

At IIT, failure isn’t just academic—it can be personal too. There's the missed opportunity to speak up in a group discussion, the regret of not starting early enough, or the silent comparison to classmates who seem to be managing everything effortlessly. But slowly, I realized that everyone is quietly carrying their own load of disappointments, burnout, and self-doubt. What separates those who sink from those who swim isn’t perfection—it’s the ability to course-correct.

Then there was that one all-nighter—the kind that almost feels like a rite of passage in college. It started as a seemingly simple group project due at 10 AM. We thought we had time. But as it usually goes, a merge conflict in Git, a bug that appeared only during the final test case, and a last-minute UI glitch spiraled the whole thing into chaos. There we were, four of us crowded around two laptops at 3 AM, drinking instant coffee, eating cold Maggi, switching roles between coder, debugger, and moral support. We finished with barely 15 minutes to spare and walked into class looking like we’d survived a hurricane. The project wasn’t perfect, but the memory of that night—the shared frustration, the breakthroughs, the laughter—is something I wouldn’t trade for anything.

These experiences taught me more than my coursework ever could. I learned how to ask for help. How to prioritize. How to move on when something doesn't go your way. And most importantly, how to treat failure not as a dead end, but as feedback. Deadlines and setbacks became checkpoints rather than stop signs. They forced me to reflect, adapt, and grow faster than comfort would’ve ever allowed.

Still walking this journey—one step at a time.

🛤️ The Journey Ahead

A year at IIT has changed me in ways I couldn’t have imagined before I arrived. I came here with technical grit, built through years of hands-on work in embedded systems and low-level programming. But over these two semesters, I’ve gained more than just technical depth—I’ve gained perspective. I’ve come to see learning not just as acquiring new skills or solving problems, but as an ongoing, layered process of becoming more aware, more adaptable, and more connected to the world around me.

This place has taught me to dream bigger, but also to be okay with not having all the answers. It has shown me that growth doesn’t happen in a straight line—it stumbles, struggles, and rebuilds. I’ve discovered new areas I want to explore, from systems programming and networking to cross-disciplinary fields like NLP and edge AI. And while I still love embedded systems and working close to the metal, I now view technology through a wider lens—one that includes human impact, ethical design, and sustainable innovation.

Looking ahead, I see my journey not as a single path, but as a branching network of opportunities. There’s research I want to pursue. Products I want to build. People I want to learn from and collaborate with. I know challenges will keep coming—deadlines, burnout, failure—but I also know I’m better equipped to face them. Not just with code, but with clarity, curiosity, and resilience.

This blog is part of that journey too. A space to share not just what I’m building, but who I’m becoming. If you’re reading this and walking a similar path, I hope you find something here that resonates. Because whether you start at a diploma college, a tier-1 institute, or somewhere entirely different, the real journey begins when you choose to keep going—deliberately, honestly, and with an open mind.

Still walking this journey—one step at a time.