Dear Indian Students
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This blog is probably going to offend some people.
Good.
Because honestly, I am tired of watching the same cycle repeat every year.
Students enter college with big dreams.
Four years later, most of them leave with excuses.
And before someone starts typing "bro you are generalizing," yes, obviously not everyone.
But if you are from an engineering background, especially a tier-3 or tier-69 college, you know exactly what I am talking about.
This is not a motivational blog.
This is not a "follow your passion" blog.
This is just a collection of observations from my own journey, my friends, people I have worked with, and thousands of students I have seen online.
So let's talk.
The Dead Crowd
Walk into most engineering classrooms.
Half the class is sleeping.
The other half is scrolling Instagram.
Nobody gives a shit about what is being taught.
And to be fair, most professors don't seem very excited either.
Everybody is just trying to get through the day.
But the problem goes deeper than bad professors.
The real issue is that our education system trained us to memorize, not to explore.
School rewarded us for remembering things.
Not questioning things.
Not building things.
Not experimenting.
Just remember the answer.
Write the answer.
Get the marks.
Repeat.
JEE, boards, entrance exams everything optimized us for scores, not curiosity. So when people enter college, they are already mentally exhausted.
They're waiting for instructions.
- Which course should I watch?
- Which language should I learn?
- Which project should I build?
- Which company should I target?
Every decision is outsourced.
If you want my detailed answers to most of these questions, I wrote an entire FAQ Blog: The FAQ
Very few people actually sit down and think:
"What do I want to learn?"
I realized this pretty early.
Within the first few months of college, I figured out something that changed everything for me.
This college is probably not going to get me where I want to go.
And after talking to people from other colleges, I realized something even funnier.
Most colleges are playing the same game.
Different building.
Different logo.
Same shit.
The only thing I could control was myself.
So in the middle of my first year, I started grinding.
Not web development. Not AI. Not any of the trendy stuff.
Graphic design and video editing.
My goal was simple.
Earn money.
Because I knew one thing.
If I wanted freedom to experiment, take risks, build weird things, fail, learn and try again, I needed financial independence.
Nobody was going to hand it to me.
That mindset got me my first internship.
Not because I was special. Not because I was smarter.
I simply accepted reality earlier than most people.
The biggest lesson?
Nobody is coming to save you.
Not your college. Not your professors. Not your friends.
Certainly not some random YouTube playlist.
The Crab Mentality Problem
The second thing I noticed is something that exists almost everywhere in India.
Competition starts too early.
Class ranks. Board marks. JEE ranks. CGPA. Placements.
Everything becomes a competition.
And after years of this, people stop seeing others as collaborators.
They start seeing everyone as threats.
Someone gets an internship?
"Must have been lucky."
Someone builds something cool?
"Probably copied it."
Someone gets a remote job?
"Must have had connections."
People would rather invent a conspiracy theory than admit someone worked harder than them.
Then comes the resource hoarding.
- People hide notes.
- Hide opportunities.
- Hide referrals.
- Hide project ideas.
- Hide resources.
Because they think helping someone else somehow reduces their own chances.
Which is stupid.
The biggest growth I have ever experienced came from sharing publicly.
Not because I am some open-source saint.
But because sharing forces you to get corrected.
People point out mistakes.
People challenge your assumptions.
People expose gaps in your understanding.
And that's how you improve.
One thing I genuinely believe is that you should get criticized heavily when you are young.
Seriously.
Make mistakes.
Get corrected.
Look stupid.
Who cares?
I am still asking senior developers questions.
Even when I already know multiple possible solutions.
Because a five-minute conversation can save me weeks of learning.
Your ego slows down your growth more than your lack of knowledge.
Most opportunities come through people.
Not platforms.
People remember people.
Build relationships.
Collaborate.
Share.
Stop treating everybody like an enemy.
The Average Tag Trap
Now comes my favorite section.
Everybody wants to be different.
Yet everybody is doing the exact same thing.
Same tutorials. Same YouTube channels. Same projects. Same portfolio designs. Same LinkedIn posts.
Then somehow everyone thinks they are unique.
This is what I call the spotlight effect.
People think they are the main character.
Reality doesn't care.
Most students are stuck in tutorial hell.
Watch tutorial. Copy code. Complete project. Feel productive. Repeat.
Remove the tutorial and suddenly they cannot build anything.
Then comes the "unique project" illusion.
A Netflix clone. A chat application. An e-commerce website. An AI wrapper. A CRUD app with fancy UI.
Inside the college bubble?
You're a genius.
Outside?
Nobody cares.
Recruiters have seen these projects hundreds of times.
Founders have seen them thousands of times.
And before someone misunderstands me, I am not saying don't build clone projects.
Build them.
They are good for learning.
Just don't mistake learning projects for innovation.
Those are two different things.
I wrote more about why learning and performing are not the same thing in We Stopped Optimizing for Skills.
I learned this lesson the hard way through my portfolio.
I open-sourced one of my portfolio templates.
Hundreds of stars.
Many forks.
A lot of people downloaded it.
And then I started seeing something ridiculous.
People weren't just copying the code.
They were copying my blogs.
My journey. My content. My setup. My identity.
Some people literally changed the name and kept everything else.
At that point, I wasn't even angry.
I was just confused.
Bro.
Build your own story.
Use my code. Use my design. Use my ideas.
I don't care.
But at least have enough self-respect to create your own identity.
That experience changed how I think about open source.
Not because I stopped believing in sharing. But because I realized a lot of people don't want to learn.
They just want shortcuts.
The Small Bubble Problem
Inside your classroom, you might be top 1%.
Inside your city, you might be top 1%.
Then you open Twitter.
And suddenly reality punches you in the face.
I remember when I first learned MERN.
I genuinely thought I was doing pretty well.
Then I started seeing what people around the world were building.
Distributed systems. AI products. Cracked C & CPP Devs. Actual engineering.
And I realized I knew absolutely nothing.
That realization was one of the best things that ever happened to me.
It pushed me into AI. Machine learning. Data analytics. Backend systems.
Different technologies. Different domains.
The internet destroyed my ego and accelerated my growth.
Your college is a tiny bubble.
The world is much bigger.
Stop comparing yourself to the people sitting next to you.
Compare yourself to the best people in the world.
Not to feel bad.
To understand how much more is possible.
When Internship Becomes Your Personality
Some people get an internship and immediately update everything.
LinkedIn banner. Bio. Headline. Story. Profile picture.
Everywhere.
"Incoming SDE Intern @LalaCompanyCo."
Brother. Relax.
It's an internship.
Not an IPO. Not a Nobel Prize.
An internship is supposed to be the beginning.
Not your entire personality.
What I find funny is that many people become more interested in announcing the internship than actually learning from it.
They care more about the title than the skill.
More about validation than growth.
Personally, I never made a big deal out of internships.
Whenever I joined somewhere, I updated my experience section and moved on.
That was it.
Maybe because I am an introvert.
Maybe because I never saw internships as achievements.
I saw them as checkpoints.
Temporary checkpoints.
Some internships stay.
Some end.
Some are amazing.
Some are terrible.
The goal was never the internship.
The goal was becoming valuable.
I was LockedIn.
AI Destroyed Average
The reality many students still haven't accepted.
AI changed the game.
A few years ago, knowing React was impressive.
Now AI can generate React.
A few years ago, CRUD projects looked impressive.
Now AI can generate CRUD projects.
A few years ago, syntax had value.
Today syntax is cheap.
The average is disappearing.
And honestly?
I am happy about it.
Because now people are finally being forced to become engineers instead of code typists.
The value is no longer in writing code.
The value is understanding problems.
Understanding systems. Understanding business. Understanding trade-offs. Understanding people.
AI didn't kill engineering.
It killed pretending to be an engineer.
I wrote more about what survives in the AI era and why actual engineers are irreplaceable in AI Can't Save Bad Engineering and AI, Software Engineering, and Job.
Final Thoughts
Your college is probably not the problem. Your professors are probably not the problem. Your friends are probably not the problem.
The market is probably not the problem.
Most of the time, the uncomfortable truth is much simpler.
You are the problem. Which is actually good news.
Because if you are the problem, you can also become the solution.
You cannot control your college. You cannot control the economy. You cannot control AI. You cannot control the job market.
But you can control whether you spend the next four years learning or complaining.
So stop waiting.
Stop blaming. Stop coping.
And stop expecting extraordinary results from average habits.
Nobody is coming to save you. Build yourself.
Because in the end, the people who win are usually not the smartest.
They are simply the ones who took responsibility earlier than everyone else.