The year 2018 has been quite a roller coaster year for me. I saw many ups and downs, many successes, and many failures faced many challenges on the personal front and struggled to keep myself on track. I have been working hard on improving my lifestyle (not materialistically) for the last few years, and the benefits have begun to show up now. This year was a pinnacle in that aspect. A lot of micro changes happened in my life this year.

When I was in eighth (or was it ninth?) class, one of our teachers asked in the class, what do you want to become in your life? People said a lot of things. When my turn came up, I stood up and said, “Mein software engineer banana chahta hu” (I want to become a software engineer). It was not that I was genuinely interested in Computers. When I look back now, I realize that it was my cousins who affected my choice (in an indirect way), and their achievements fascinated me to aim at this particular career choice.

Four years ago, in this very month of June, JEE Mains results were out. I had screwed up my JEE Advanced, so I had to settle for an NIT. My AIR was good enough to get me a seat of Computer Science and Engineering in any of the NITs except the first three (at that time Trichy, Warangal, and Surathkal). I was skeptical about going to NIT Calicut because of its distance from my native place, so NIT Allahabad was the most suitable choice.

I am using i3 window manager for the last seven months, and it has been a pleasant and productive experience so far. There were a few hiccups here and there, but that is expected with such minimalistic setups. One thing that I never noticed was the lack of notifications on critical battery levels. For the last few months, my laptop battery was discharging to 0% all the time. Probably this proved to be too fatal for my battery.

Now that I am graduated from NIT Calicut, one more chapter of my life is over. It is time to move on to the next page, but before I begin that phase, I thought it would be nice, to sum up, the experience that I gathered in NIT Calicut. The last four years have been great for me. I learned a lot of new life lessons, but there were some decisions that I could have avoided.