What all I did wrong in my B.Tech life!!

Hey guys, this is my first post on medium, or better, first time I am writing anywhere. And I have no clue on how to do it properly. In fact, I hate reading books and writing diaries. Also, I am very weak in Ungesh too so it’s okay. This is how we learn right. LOL

Anyways let’s start. My name is Arjun Muraleedharan and I’m from Kerala. I am doing my last year B.Tech in Computer Science from Sree Chitra Thirunal College Of Engineering, Trivandrum. I am currently in my final semester and will complete my course in about 4 months. I am not at all the person I was 4 years back when I joined college and I thought I should be sharing this with everyone. My life has changed dramatically since I joined college. I’ll tell you why but this is going to be a long story so listen closely and don’t miss anything.

Okay so let me first tell you that I had some friends before joining college. Then I gained some more from college and lost most of them after some time then lost some more in general and made new ones and so on. Well, this continued on happening and is still happening so I guess this is how life is.

One of the biggest mistakes I made in life is not being able to talk to people. I am not actually an introverted person if you ask me or anyone in college because I am so hyperactive and extroverted around some people I am really comfortable with but I can’t even say Hi to people I know. I have very few friends in college. Well, I do have a lot of “friends” but you know what I mean. I try to avoid most of these “friends” in college and I try to look away from their face so that they don’t see me. TBH I hate most of the people in college except some people. Okay, coming to our topic, I don’t talk to people and that is a bad thing, and let me explain why. So in my 2nd year, a senior from my college came to me asked that he had a startup idea and if I wanna join in. That was the time that startups were booming and people always talked about it and said that having a startup means that I will have hands-on experience in the industry and I will be better than my competitors when comes to placements and blah blah blah the usual startup talks. and I thought, “Hey being in a startup is a cool thing, let’s do it” and we did. We had a startup and we got registered into an incubation program. I was the worst at talking to people and was so afraid, so I didn’t attend any of the conferences or talks or anything and tried to not do any of that stuff intentionally. But now that I think about it, startups are not just about technology. For a technical startup like mine, yes it needs some good coders, but moreover, it is about talking to people, making connections and networking between people. So we stopped doing this after a while because everyone in my startup was either graduating or got a job or was busy with their projects and all. Anyways we stopped doing the startup and what did I have to take away from it?? Actually NONE!!

So you might be thinking I should have learned something on the technical side right?? Well, that is mistake number two. Never ever do copy-paste work because then there is no looking back. Why did my senior and my super senior approach me when there were many other people in their classes and all for the startup? That is because I was really into coding since I was in high school. Not the coding prodigy kind but with some better logic that the people I know. So I thought it might be good that I do some research and study some high-level programming other than C++ before joining college, and I end up learning some web development skills like HTML, CSS, the basic stuff. Back then I tried to implement them from scratch with my own code and they used to look horrible but then it became okay but it was nothing compared to the pro sites. So I started digging more and I started using templates to build them and so it came out better. Thus they knew that I would so the front end of our startup project and thus me. I was struggling to do that from the scratch on so I again made them using templates and copy-paste most of the code, sometimes not even trying to understand what it is and then if it didn’t work, then look into it and all. So that made me so uncomfortable from writing code from scratch. Currently, I am trying to work on Computer Vision and Deep Learning but since I am not able to write code from scratch, I tend to do the copy-paste work which in most cases won’t work and I end up being debugging someone else’s code which won’t even work. Yesterday I was looking through some LinkedIn Jobs and I saw this post and it said, “You will be doing a lot of coding and we need people who can code solutions from scratch and not people who do copy-paste work”. This is when I realized that all I have been doing throughout my 4 years have been nothing but making people believe that I am good at it and failing all the time smartly trying to hide everything.

This brings down to another mistake I have been doing all along, which is thinking what others will think about me. I am not a slave to it fully and I actually don’t care if people think anything about me about somethings but somethings I do. This is a very bad mistake one can take on his life. Since childhood my mom would say don’t do that what will everyone say. That is what should be changed. Since then we live in this fear. This affected me in multiple ways, me trying to hide my mistakes and my insecurities. Everyone does that, well most of them accept this and others don’t.

Now let me talk about one of my own insecurity which most people in the world does not have, Talking in English. Okay okay I know you might be so proficient in this language that even Shashi Tharoor might be surprised but well, I am not. I came from a village and my school was an English medium one too. But if someone spoke English, everyone else including me would say that he is showing off and so no one used to. I used to watch too many English movies because I thought Malayalam movies were too dumb to see which turned out to be false again!! But anyways, this is what thought me basic English. But I was really afraid to speak in English that if it comes to it that I had to do it, I stutter too much that the person hearing it would leave (literally this happened)😆. So anyways half through my college life, one of my best friends asked me to speak in English only and gave me the courage to speak and now I do stutter but the person hearing it would understand what I had to say 💁.

Well, this is not only the mistakes I made. I made many mistakes with my friends also, I blindly trusted many of them, I should have trusted some others, left some of them intentionally, didn’t try too much and the list goes on and on. But these are some of those mistakes that is okay to do. But I have no right to say that, Yes, because I have not been able to fight myself and correct these mistakes. Well, one day I hope of doing that. Maybe it’ll never happen. Let’s hope.

But my point being,

— Don’t think about what other people think of you, because they will always have something no matter what you do

— Don’t hesitate to talk to others because you need them, opportunities will never come to you. You need to walk up to it and talk your shit out of them.

— Never compare yourself with someone else, because you are not them and don’t try to be because you’re shit the way you are they are too.

— Oh, and if you are a computer science student, please never ever ever do copy-paste work on your projects because then you will never be able to do something on your own. That is the dark side. You might feel this is good at first but then it will consume you so bad that you might not even be able to come back from it.

— Grab as many friends as possible as this might be your last chance at having some real friends in life.