The season of exams are on and hundreds of students who wrote them and their anxious parents will be evaluating the results with mixed emotions, some elated and some disappointed. Exams are a stepping stone to a potential career but they do not completely decide your life. #MoreThanMarks is a campaign by The Logical Indian to bring out real-life stories of ordinary people who became successful despite their marks and to stress on the fact that you can be successful and lead a happy life even if you are/were not an academic topper.
“I have always been an ‘above average student’, but nothing extraordinary. But this did not stop me from working towards creating my own space; a space where I can be who I want to be”, says Nitya Pawar as she lounges comfortably under the shade of a gazebo. We are in the campus of Ashoka University, one of India’s best liberal arts universities. Nitya is pursuing a PhD in English at Ashoka, and I am there to know more about her journey.
“You cracked IIT-JEE and yet you say you were not an extraordinary student!?” I say
“Oh No! I never reached the much sought-after nineties, except in my ninth standard. My results in 10th and 12th says it all. In 10th, I got 89%. Since, I studied in a state board school, this score was considered quite high. It became a mark of my capability and my parents asked me to start preparing for JEE. I was so clueless at that time that when the director of the coaching instituate I was to attend, asked me the full form of IIT, I wasn’t able to answer.”
“Then why IIT?”
“I come from a typical Indian middle-class family, and like many other parents mine also wanted me to go for an engineering degree. I did not know any better myself so, I made their dreams my own. I put my head down and powered through endless hours of studying. Now you’d expect that after this, my result in 12th must have been good, right?”, she asks with a twinkle in her eye.
“Well, yes. Wasn’t it?” I say
“I got 84% in 12th.” she says and laughs.
“Then what about all the work that you put in? all the preparation that you did?” I ask
“It did pay off. I managed to get through JEE and secure a seat in one of the newly opened IIT’s, IIT Gandhinagar. Although it was right on the margin, but hey once you’re in you’re in, right?” she says with a smile. “It has always been like this for me. I have managed to get through things staying right on the edge, even when the odds were stacked against me. Now you may call it luck or hard-work or anything else, but personally I feel that it was because of the belief that I had in myself and my capabilities.”
Now it was my turn to smile. “What happened after you cracked JEE?”
“Oh! I was elated, ecstatic, and so many other superlative words!” she says laughing.
“Of course, but I mean how was it for you in IIT?”
“I am from a small town. For the longest time I wasn’t even aware of what IIT was. For me, cracking it was my biggest achievement. But, when I got there, I met these people from other places, who just viewed IIT as a stepping stone. Many of my batchmates used to be off-handed while talking about their JEE ranks, which were better than mine by a long shot. They talked about big things like foreign degrees, post-doctorates and whatnot; things about which I only had a vague idea. I realized that this was just a beginning.
It again got back to working hard, but this time it was just to keep up with my batchmates. Again, I was in the average tier, and just staying there took a lot of hard work and struggle. I averaged a CPI between 5-6 for the first six semesters and even got two F’s, my first Fail grades ever. I gave my all in the last two semesters and finished with a CPI of 6.25.” “Don’t take me wrong, it wasn’t just studying and slogging over projects of course. College was an environment of opportunities and I had some of my best experiences there. I met some of the best people there and forged lifelong friendships. It was there that I learned a lot about myself.”
“What would you consider to be most important thing that you learned?”
“That I do not want to pursue a career in engineering.” she laughs.
“Really?”
“You have to understand that it wasn’t by my own choice that I got into IIT. Yes, the hard work was mine but the choice had been made for me once I was through my 10th Std. You can say that this realization was a result of me learning to choose for myself, by myself.”
“That’s a good way to look at it. So, what did you do once you realized it?”
“I stuck to what I knew best. Hard work. Despite all of these realizations, I got through it. Again, with a very average result, but along with a whole bucket of experiences and learnings that serve me well even today.”
“What next then?”
“I was in the frustrating and difficult transitional period between undergraduate studies and the future. I had no idea about what I wanted to do. Whether it was a job, a change in disciplines, further studies in engineering it…
