….adapting to the rules and regulations, dress codes, timings, assignments
Like every other college student, I too experienced jitters of anxiety, excitement, nervousness and what not on the first day. It’s always said that the first impression is more of a lasting one.
Moving away to another country for college, leaving behind old friends, I happened to realize that I had been living inside a cushioned box with my family and friends I’ve had since ages, and as the first day passed by with new acquaintances that it had to offer, with new teaching methods, different people I had met, it suddenly hit me that here the real talk was not about the whims and fantasies of a teenager, but about aspirations and career choices of a growing adult. The pressure of adapting to the rules and regulations, dress codes, timings, assignments, and no holidays was drilled into us during the pre-induction itself. The box, which we had kept ourselves in, had slowly been hacked away at hauling me out of it and throwing me into the vast expanse of life away from home.
The first day started at half past 9, everyone gathered in the amphitheater in their first groups they had made. Introductions were exchanged, judgement followed, and conversations were to be continued. The first lecture was Business Communication Theories (BCT), and the professor came into the class, made us introduce ourselves, and introduced us to the basics of communication. As a student, who enjoyed debates, I was fascinated by the fact that classes would not be about learning from books but it would involve more of intrapersonal communication and various happenings would be discussed and related to the topics that we studied. Followed by this we had the language class, which involved more of introductions, and the last lecture of the day was Business Automation. We were introduced to most of the topics that we would be covering for the entire semester. Since it was our first class, we enjoyed the last half hour working on paint and basically still bonding as a batch.
To be honest, this college life was way different than what most of us had imagined, but it was something I wanted to look forward to. I still remember how panicked I was at the thought of coming into India’s best institute and being scared of the fact that I would be totally incompetent and unable to cope with the other students’ who had studied this subject earlier. The most positive aspect of the first day or rather of the entire first semester for me was how encouraging yet competitive the entire curriculum was structured to be. It included subjects related to more of corporal communication, but it was all taught with so much ease. Economics turned out to be my favourite subject even though it was dreaded by me, a science student in the past, the way Prof. Ashish Kulkarni illustrated the subject and correlated it on the very first day of college with simple examples from our immediate surroundings, made it easy to absorb the subject altogether.
The fact that we study this entire course for the first time is a different kind of an adventure. It’s a new life altogether, a chance to reinvent ourselves, pick up talents we are usually scared to venture into, and experiment with the new opportunities that the course has to offer, both on field and off.
Article by: Harsha Balwani (Batch of 2019)
Photograph by: Aditya Sinha (Batch of 2019)
