title: “My First Year of College — A Work in Progress” author: Tanay Shah pubDatetime: 2025-03-11T00:00:00Z description: “5 months into engineering. here’s what actually happened.” tags:
- college
- personal
- engineering draft: false featured: true
My First Year of College — A Work in Progress
[tanay shah] | [cse aiml] | [pes university]
I’m still in my second semester. This isn’t a wrap-up. It’s a live document.
I didn’t really know what to expect walking into college. I think most people don’t. You spend years hearing about it — the freedom, the friendships, the chaos — and then suddenly you’re standing in the middle of it, trying to figure out which bmtc to catch and whether you’ll make it to the first lecture on time.
That was August for me.
August — In at the Deep End
College started with something called Bootstrap Week — a week before actual classes began, designed to throw you into completely different domains before you’d even settled in. One day you’re in a mechanical workshop learning how to change car tyres. The next, you’re at a nursery moving plants around and helping with planting as part of a social service activity. Electrical, AIML, and more — all in the span of a week.
On paper it sounds random. In practice, it was one of the best things that could have happened in week one — because it forced you to talk to people you’d never normally talk to, work alongside them, get your hands dirty together. Most of the friends I made that week are still people I’m in touch with today. That feels significant, in hindsight.
I also figured out how to commute — which bus to take, when to leave, how the campus is laid out. Small things, but they matter more than people give them credit for.
September — Space Junk, Red Bull, and a Dog on the Sixth Floor
Then September arrived, and with it — real college.
Actual classes. An actual timetable. A classroom with a number on the door. I made more friends in those first weeks, layering them on top of the bootstrap ones, building out this expanding circle of people I genuinely liked spending time with.
But the thing that defined September wasn’t the classes — it was a hackathon.
I’d gone to an orientation for a college club called Equinox, mostly out of curiosity. The orientation itself was a bit of a snooze, but buried in it was an announcement: their flagship 24-hour hackathon, Syzygy, was coming up. I applied with three friends, not entirely sure what we were getting into.
What we ended up building was a consultancy model for companies trying to remove space junk from low Earth orbit — essentially, a chaser satellite business. We were first-year students running on Red Bull and monster, the kind of sleep-deprived and slightly unhinged energy that only a hackathon can produce. We qualified into the top 10. We lost the next round. That stung a little, but looking back — we had built something real, something we hadn’t known how to build 24 hours earlier. That counts for something.
When it was over, I went home and completely crashed.
A few days later we were on a football turf, just messing around, and everything felt light again. September also had a fresher’s week — cowboy themed, chaotic in the best way. And somewhere in week four, a dog wandered into our classroom. We were on the sixth floor. No one could explain it.
October — Jackfruit Problems and Post-ISA Drinks
October was quieter in energy, louder in everything else.
Someone in my friend group decided it was time I learned poker, and so we played — in class, more than once. We went to watch a college cricket match and a kabaddi match right on campus, which turned out to be genuinely gripping. At one point, someone landed badly and got a concussion. It was brutal to see — a sharp reminder that sport, even at college level, is physical and real.
Then there was physics.
Our professor used a problem-solving scale that month — Jackfruit, Orange, Banana — with banana being the easiest and jackfruit being the kind of problem that makes you stare at the page and question your choices. We got a jackfruit-level problem. It was hard. We pulled through, let’s say, collaboratively. No further comment.
The ISA 1 timetable finally dropped in October, and with it came that familiar shift — the whole class locked in, group chats got serious. I went to visit a school friend during the Dussehra break, which was a welcome exhale. And the moment ISA 1 was done, a group of us went out for drinks. Not to celebrate doing well — just to celebrate it being over.
November — Cops, Waterfalls, and My Second Hackathon
November was eventful in the most unexpected ways.
Mid-month, the college had a visit from what I can only describe as a significant law enforcement presence — cops and IRS raiding the campus. Half a dozen government-badged cars just parked outside. There was also an incident in a nearby area where a shop owner was caught recording women inappropriately — action was taken. It was a jarring few days. College life, as it turns out, is not insulated from the world outside it.
On the club front, I volunteered for logistics at Chords ‘25 — handling ticketing and operations, which was a different kind of learning. Then came Kodikon 5.0, a 24-hour hackathon I helped organise from the operations side, pulling a half-day shift to keep things running. Being on the other side of a hackathon is a different experience entirely.
And then there was Maps Reimagined — a hackathon sponsored by latlong.ai — which I almost didn’t apply to.
By this point, I’d started to develop a more complicated relationship with hackathons. I’d noticed something after Syzygy that I couldn’t quite shake: it wasn’t really about how skilled you were anymore. Knowing a programming language well didn’t give you the edge it once might have. It was increasingly about how prepared you’d come in, how well you could collaborate with your team, and how effectively you could leverage the tools available — including AI. Whether that’s a good or bad thing, I’m honestly still working out.
So I was hesitant. My friends asked me to join. I said yes mostly because I didn’t think we’d get in.
We got in.
We showed up, and immediately I realised my teammates hadn’t worked with Git or GitHub before — tools I consider pretty fundamental in a 24-hour build sprint. I walked them through the basics and we got going. Somewhere in the middle of the hackathon, during a code review, we realised our problem statement was too basic. We scrambled to add features — ultimately building a tool to find the safest and shortest walking routes at night for the city of Delhi, using latlong.ai’s API (which, notably, we had unlimited access to — an opportunity I feel we didn’t fully capitalise on, largely due to miscommunication on the problem statement early on).
Toward the end, we were running on no sleep, getting cranky, disagreeing on things, and seriously considering giving up. But we didn’t. We pushed through, presented our project, and did not qualify in the top 5 out of around 30 teams.
I don’t think I’ve fully made peace with where I stand on hackathons. They’re exhausting, they consume your weekends, and the Monday after is brutal. But there’s also something about the act of pushing through — disagreeing, struggling, and still getting something across the finish line — that I can’t dismiss. I’m still figuring out what I think about all of it.
The month ended with the ESA timetable dropping — and with a spontaneous trip to TK Falls near college, riding there on my Activa with friends on their own bikes. It was a good day. The kind of day you don’t plan but end up remembering.
ISA 2 results came back, and if I’m being honest — I think I got too comfortable after ISA 1. I could have done better. That one’s on me.
December — Slow, Quiet, Necessary
December was uneventful by design. Seniors were deep in their end-semester exams. We were buried in ISA 2 prep and ESA study. Events dried up. The campus felt quieter. The month moved slowly, punctuated only by assessments and internal submissions.
There’s not much to say about December, and maybe that’s the point. Not every month is a hackathon or a waterfall trip or a dog on the sixth floor. Sometimes a month is just you, your notes, and the slow grind toward the end of a semester.
Where I Am Now
First semester is done. I’m in my second semester now, and I still don’t have a clean answer to what I learned or who I’m becoming. I made friends I didn’t expect to keep. I built things I didn’t know how to build. I pushed through two hackathons, ran operations for a third, changed a car tyre, moved some plants around, and watched a dog walk into a sixth-floor classroom.
I got some things wrong. I could have communicated better. I could have studied harder in certain stretches. I got overconfident at the wrong time. These are not dramatic failures — they’re just the quiet lessons that don’t announce themselves until you’re looking back.
I think the honest summary is this: I showed up, most of the time. And I’m still figuring out the rest.
[Second semester — coming soon.]