The offer letter tells you when to report, which building to report to, and what documents to carry. It leaves out the more useful things — how to make the best of the years to come. What follows is a distillation of conversations with batchmates and recent graduates, along with experiences of my own, verified by the years since. the first year The pressure to know what you want to work on quickly is mostly noise. ...
Once I got comfortable with the courses and the campus, I expected life at IISc to be calm and wholly academic – and it was that, but also so much more. As I write to you now from a wholly different city, I wonder how so much could have happened in the span of 18 months, and how you can change this much as a person while being the same in many ways that count. ...
Not a lot of people know this, but when I decided to write GATE, I did it with mostly just IISc in mind. However, I tried to keep my expectations very realistic (read: low), to the extent that I didn’t even look up pictures of the campus until results came out, wanting to not have an image to go along with my disappointment if things were to go south. I spent five months telling myself to be ready to embrace the plan Bs and Cs instead, while doing whatever I could to ensure I wouldn’t have to resort to them. ...