My First Year of College

My first year of college began, as many journeys do, with a goodbye.

My parents had come to IIT Madras, to drop me off, on the 24^th of July, 2025. The first few days were full of exciting events – an orientation by the professors and the Director, Professor V. Kamakoti, and a number of workshops and events organized by the various student clubs and organisations. My parents stayed at a hotel nearby, and helped me get set up, buying me various daily essentials, showing me around the city, and helping me settle in. It would be my first time away from home, and I was excited and nervous in equal measure.

On 27^th July, 2025, my parents left for our home in Bangalore – and for the first time in my life of 18 years, I was alone, without my parents.

It was a truly new experience for me. I was accommodated in Mandakini hostel – an enormous building, capable of housing over 2000 students. Mandakini is used for housing BTech (Bachelor of Technology), BS (Bachelor of Science), MTech (Master of Technology) and MS (Master of Science) first-year male students at IIT Madras. My own branch is BS Biosciences – a Bachelor of Science in Biological Sciences!

The first week was free of classes, giving the students a chance to settle in. We rode around the campus on our newly-bought bicycles (a necessity in IITM – it takes nearly 15 minutes to walk from the hostel to the closest classrooms), met new people, made friends, and learned the locations of the different buildings and classrooms.

3 people shared a room in Mandakini; unfortunately, the rooms are designed to be 2-sharing, not 3-sharing. This caused quite a bit of crowding – the space was cramped and negotiating which cupboards would belong to whom took quite a while.

I was accommodated with two other boys from my branch. This was the standard practice in Mandakini – rooms were decided by roll number, and roll number was decided by your name and your branch. My name started with an A, so my roll number was right near the beginning of the list for my branch.

In orientation week, all the clubs – cultural as well as tech clubs – all showcased their projects, or explained the club’s working to us. The drama club, writing club, and quiz club all attracted my interest. On the tech side, I was, of course, interested in the Biotech Club, but alongside it, I also found the Game-dev and 3D Printing Club interesting.

And then, classes started. It was a new style of teaching – we cycled (or walked) from classroom to classroom, our professors filed into the rooms, delivered their lectures, and then we all filed out. This was something I had never experienced before – in school, we sat in our classrooms and my teachers came in for each class.

Most of the classes in first year covered concepts we had already covered in 11^th and 12^th, simply in a bit more detail, and most of them were pretty easy to follow. The questions asked in assignments and exams were a bit more challenging, but far more interesting than JEE problems – they actually required thought and effort, rather than rote memorization!

But most exciting of all was my first biology course – an introductory course to biology. I hadn’t taken biology in 11^th and 12^th, though I had studied some concepts for fun – I had an interest in cell biology and genetics for a long, long time, which was why I picked this branch. But this course was intended to bring all the students in our branch to the same level – and it did so wonderfully.

In the first semester, our courses were completely fixed, with no option to take electives or drop courses. We had 1 course each of physics, chemistry, mathematics and biology, and 1 Physics lab. Apart from this, we had a 3-hour Life Skills class every week, which mainly involved doing various fun activities, and then reflecting on the purpose and learnings from them.

Apart from this, we were supposed to take a recreational course – one of a set of different 2-hour classes, meant to add extracurricular skills to our skillset.

I decided to go for Hapkido – a Korean martial art. This was an exciting first for me – I had never had any interest in any sports. My parents had tried, repeatedly, to get me to play any sport. They had also tried martial arts several times, all to no avail. But now, I am interested in the idea myself – and so I decided to start. Classes were 2 hours long, 3 days a week – Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays.

Unfortunately, I misunderstood – Hapkido is not a recreational course. It is part of a different group of extracurricular courses, which couldn’t be credited as recreational courses. I didn’t realise this fact, however, until after my first semester.

In August, on my mom’s birthday, my parents and grandparents came over to visit me. Due to a fortunate lining up of holidays, we were able to take a short trip to Mahabalipuram, where we had loads of fun, before returning to IITM.

As college began in earnest, events and activities began popping up. To round out my first-semester courses and credits, I had to choose one of 4 programmes to join, offered by 4 different Organisations – NCA (National Cultural Association), NSO (National Sports Organisation), NSS (National Social Service) or NCC (National Cadet Corps). I had no interest in NSO or NCC, and NSS sounded a bit boring to me – so I chose NCA. I did have an interest in writing and in drama, so I thought I could do well.

The way one joined these programs was by auditioning for them. I wrote up a short story for NCA Writing – writing is one of my passions – and auditioned for NCA Drama. These were organized by the Writing and Drama Clubs of IITM.

Although the NCA courses were compulsory to join, the actual course was organized and managed by the student-run Cultural Clubs.

This is one of the most interesting features of IITM – although staff and faculty occupied head positions of many clubs and committees, the majority of clubs and teams are entirely student-run and student-managed, with the faculty/staff primarily there to approve major decisions, authorize payments, etc.

I didn’t actually get into NCA Drama – my primary interest at the time – but I did get selected for two different Drama Club events. One was Festember – an event organized by NIT Trichy, where a number of colleges, including IITM, would put on plays, in September. The other was Freshie Nite, a fun event for freshers, with events like music, dance, and plays organized by freshers themselves.

I did get into NCA Writing, but that course didn’t start immediately – because the organisers were unable to find a good teacher for the course.

At the same time, exams drew near. The majority of courses in IITM work on one of two models – either there are two Quizzes, and an end-semester exam, or there is a mid-semester and an end-semester. Our Quiz 1 was fast approaching, and we began focusing a little more on our studies.

And then Quiz 1 was over – I did reasonably well – and we rushed to prepare for Freshie Nite. We had just about a week, and we didn’t even have a script!

Well, I was determined. The event was a mime, so there was no need for dialogue. I came up with – and rejected – multiple ideas and concepts, before settling on a murder mystery. Expressing emotion and concepts without words, and with our faces covered with masks, was an incredible challenge, but we all worked hard towards it. Half of the initial team left, due to other time commitments, and we had to get new people.

In the end, we did manage to put on a performance – and it was a good one! It started far later than expected – that is a standard part of any IITM event – but it did happen, and everyone performed perfectly – and the freshers loved it!

The other dance and music performances were also incredible, and we had a tremendous amount of fun that day.

The rest of the year passed in a flurry of coursework, exams, and a lot of fun with friends.

In between, I went home several times on long weekends, or when we could negotiate additional holidays. At one point, we negotiated a week straight from the professors!

Unfortunately, my parents had to visit at another time for a less-fun reason – one of my front teeth was dying.

My left front incisor has suffered an incredible amount of battering over the years from varied injuries – at that time, there was barely half the tooth left, with the rest being replaced with cement, and I had healed stitches on my upper lip from an accident which had split it open. I had had to have braces – the most complex, large, ones with springs – in the past, but thankfully those were gone by then.

Unfortunately, my left incisor had apparently had enough, and the half-a-tooth was dying – the pulp was blackish, making the tooth appear blackish, and it caused a great deal of pain to even touch it with my tongue.

After a consultation with both my institute dentists and my usual dentist in Bangalore on a visit home, we decided to have a root canal and replace it with a cap.

Unfortunately, timings didn’t align such that my usual dentist could do it – so we looked for a good dentist in Chennai. We found one, but my parents still weren’t sure whether I would be able to go and handle everything on my own, so they drove over to Chennai (living in Bangalore had some perks!) and took me there themselves.

Well, my root canal was completed, a cap was placed in due course of time, and finally, my teeth were (sort of) back to normal.

As November – the end of the semester – approached, a number of clubs (cultural as well as tech) began opening applications for the Deputy Coordinator positions – filled by first years. The main, immediate, purpose of these Deputy Coordinators would be to organize the events at SHAASTRA and SAARANG, the technology and cultural fests of IITM respectively. SHAASTRA takes place every year in the first week of January, and SAARANG in the second week.

My parents had decided to shift from our long-term home in Bangalore – where I grew up – to Kolkata – for good, after almost 23 years. We have two rambunctious Shih Tzus, so much so that they cannot travel in any public vehicle namely train or plane - thus to shift them from Bangalore to Kolkata we undertook an incredible journey by road – we drove for 5 days taking breaks at nights through various towns and a village – Nellore, Rajahmudri, Srikakulam, Puri, Dagara Beach (near Digha).

My grandparents live in Kolkata, and we were staying with them while my parents went around arranging for our final shift to Kolkata, that was planned by the end of January. In this hodgepodge I was unfortunately not able to take part in either SHAASTRA or SAARANG, as the events themselves sounded interesting, and organizing them sounded even more interesting.

I didn’t mind, however. After 2 years of JEE Preparation, and before that regular holiday homework and shortened holidays, getting 2 months straight of holidays with almost nothing to do was incredible. We had a lot of fun, and we found the time to watch movies, go out to restaurants to eat, and visit our ancestral village. Kolkata in the winter is quite cool, even cold at times.

Before the epic journey, in November, as my parents drove to pick me up from IITM and we took a short trip to Mysore, before heading home that was still in Bangalore – we had a good time, visiting the zoo and other places around the city. We had been to the city many times when I had been younger, and this was more of a trip to go down the memory lane – as enjoyable as ever.

In the first week of December, my first semester grades came in – I got the maximum grade, S, in every subject, giving me a perfect CGPA of 10. We were all extremely happy, of course, and it added a boost to an already fantastic vacation.

I also got to pick my first elective course. My second semester courses were also mostly fixed, with only 1 elective – a humanities elective. I chose Chinese – I had always been interested in the language, and I decided to take the opportunity to study it.

There was a bit of confusion about the exact date of rejoining at my institute, and our tickets were booked a little too early. Unfortunately, it was a little difficult to get plane tickets at sufficiently short notice, so I went back along with my parents to Bangalore by train, where they had to stay for a while to handle packing and organizing everything for our final move to Kolkata. Then I left for Chennai a few days later, by train.

The new semester went very similarly to the first one – with the main difference being that I actually knew quite a bit about how the institute worked, now. I knew where the classrooms and department buildings were, and I knew the fastest routes to get there. I knew how classes could be expected to be organized, and I knew the basics of day-to-day life.

We had the same hostel room in the second semester as in the first, which was nice.

Classes started soon after I reached, and we began learning a new set of concepts. They were, once again, mostly in-depth discussions of concepts we had learned in 11^th and 12^th. This time, we had a Chemistry Lab rather than a Physics Lab, and our biology course was Biochemistry – a field which had always fascinated and enthralled me.

This time, too, I joined Hapkido – but when I asked my master to fill in my recreational course credits, he told me that Hapkido had been dropped from the list of recreational courses entirely, over a year back!

Naturally, this was concerning – I had missed a whole semester worth of mandatory credits! So, I went to the admin office to sort it out, and as I previously mentioned, found out that I had sorely misunderstood, and Hapkido was not, in fact, a recreational course.

Well, it wasn’t too late to fix things, so I immediately signed up for Yoga – which would be a 2-hour class on Wednesdays alone. I would do yoga in my second semester and something else in my third, to cover up the required number of credits – that was my plan.

Unfortunately, this did mean that I would need to skip the Wednesday classes of Hapkido, which overlapped nearly entirely with the yoga classes. This would be a significant blow to my attendance, but I talked about it to my master, and he agreed that we’d work something out.

Near the end of January, tryouts opened for the departmental basketball team. I didn’t have much hope of getting in – I wasn’t good at most sports, and I was just decent at basketball – but I decided to try, regardless.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have the right shoes, so I decided to just try out in my regular walking shoes.

This was an incredibly bad mistake. During tryouts, I accidentally landed from a jump wrong, and smashed my toes directly into the ground. My left big toenail took the brunt of the impact – and the toenail died.

It was incredibly painful, and it turned blackish – a very concerning event. I went to the hospital, who advised removing it immediately, to prevent chances of infection. I agreed to the procedure.

Getting a toenail removed is horrible. It hurts immensely, and the fact that the flesh underneath was damaged (which was why it was being removed in the first place) did not help.

Anyway, once the toenail was off, the wound was cleaned and dressed, and I was instructed to return to change the dressing regularly. My mom did some research, and we found it would take nearly 2-2.5 years for it to heal entirely!

Well, life went on. The wound healed slowly, and was under threat of getting infected again, a few times – antibiotics and other drugs were prescribed, the dressing was changed, the wound was cleaned several times – and finally, it was out of the danger zone. I could see the hardened scab (which was different from a normal scab!), covering the region where the toenail would eventually come in, and the small piece of new nail growing out from the skin.

Injuries aside, the most interesting thing happened in early February – the CFI competition teams opened applications.

CFI – the Center for Innovation – is one of the most interesting parts of IITM. It includes a number of technology clubs, which works on various hands-on projects during the year. But it also includes some competition teams – teams which works on practical projects, for the purposes of going to certain national or international competitions. These includes Anveshak, a team aiming to design and develop a hyperloop, which goes to international Hyperloop competitions regularly; Abhiyaan, a team intending to design autonomous vehicles, which went to IGVC, a competition in Oakland University; Abhyudaya, a team which designed and built rockets and went to amateur rocketry competitions, and many others.(Find more details about CFI and all its teams here: https://cfi.iitm.ac.in/)

But the most interesting of all, to me, was iGEM. iGEM stands for the International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition – an international competition held every year in November, in Paris. iGEM is a competition of synthetic biology – effectively, modifying and using living organisms and their byproducts to solve practical, real-world problems.

As applications began opening, I tried my hand at the application for Abhyudaya – the rocketry team. I think I managed to do pretty well, but I did it primarily to learn the concepts involved, because they seemed interesting.

On the 7^th of February, my birthday, my parents came over, and I spent the whole day outside with them, having fun.

Near the middle of February, a few days after my birthday, iGEM applications opened. I immediately began filling it out, leaving the Abhyudaya application aside. I did submit the application, but I didn’t really intend to join the team, if I could get into iGEM. Biology and genetic engineering are my real passion.

I worked hard, and filled the application as well as I could. It involved a number of technical and general questions, testing my understanding of the basic concepts involved in synthetic biology, and the general structure and idea of what would be done in this year’s project.

In-between, in the last-but-one week of February, the first quiz of the second semester went by. I took a break from my application in between, of course, and did decently well.

And then, finally, I submitted my iGEM application, and waited with baited breath to see the results.

And a few days later, I was called for an interview! My application had been accepted!

I showed up at the time of the interview, nervous and excited. I had never done anything like this before – usually, any sort of competition or project that I had done involved simply writing an exam of some sort.

My interview went pretty well – the questions were all based on the application itself, or related topics, and the interviewers were all my immediate seniors – students from the batch of 2024.

The way iGEM – and most other competition teams – worked, organization-wise, was that first-years, in their second semester, would apply and give interviews, and be selected as Project Members. Then, the next year, applications would be opened for the positions of Project Heads, and the students in their 4^th semester would apply and be selected. The following year, usually the same students who were Heads would apply for the position of Core in their 6^th semester, and 3 would be selected for the same.

The full team was also split into two main halves – the Wet Lab and the Dry Lab. The Wet Lab works on actual lab work like adding reagents, culturing bacteria, and making genetic modifications. The Dry Lab works on computational simulations of the biological environments we can’t work on directly in the lab, on molecular and protein-folding simulations, and other such modelling work.

Many experiments and tests are too time-consuming, too resource-intensive, or simply require too much data to work through in the lab. Here, the Dry Lab helps narrow down the tests required to a manageable number.

Although the Dry Lab is incredibly important and does very interesting work, my interests lay in the Wet Lab alone. I had applied for the Wet Lab, and the Wet Lab Heads were the ones who interviewed me.

Later in the year, a Hard Lab was added to our iGEM team, to design and develop Hardware, if required, for the project. But this was composed simply of a few of the pre-existing Heads.

And then, a few days later, as I waited with baited breath… I got the message, telling me that I had been accepted!

We had a full team meet soon, and we were introduced to the project details – we would be working on detecting intestinal tuberculosis, using a sensor molecule called FlipNanoLuc, engineered into E. coli, a common bacteria used in genetic engineering labs.

There were 4 Wet Lab members, this year. Two of the others were my branch-mates, and the last was from Chemical Engineering. There were also 4 Wet Lab Heads, and they began guiding, teaching, and instructing us about the various kinds of work we would be doing.

Soon, in addition to regular college life, we began spending a lot of time doing research work for iGEM, preparing lab protocols and studying techniques, looking up DNA constructs, proteins, and other material in preparation for when work would start – in the summer break, from the middle of May. We often worked late into the night at the CFI building, much to the dismay of my mother.

In mid-March, there was an Expo at IITM, in which all the clubs and teams of CFI (and a few external teams) participated, revealing our project, spreading awareness, and telling the visitors about iGEM and synthetic biology as a whole.

It was one of my first exposures to representing a team at an official event, and it was extremely exciting. I learned quite a bit about speaking and explaining complex topics to a wide variety of people with a wide variety of backgrounds. Our Heads and Cores were present, of course, to help out whenever needed.

It was marred somewhat by the fact that I had a really bad cold or fever of some sort during the time, but I managed to pull through.

Our second Quiz also took place near the end of March. I did decently, but my marks began to dip a little in Maths. My score in the Physics Midsem examination was also not as good as I would like, and I resolved to focus a little more on those subjects.

At the end of March, right after my exams ended, a number of institute holidays aligned such that by negotiating a little with our professors to get three additional holidays, we managed to get a solid continuous 9 days of vacations.

I took the opportunity to go home, to Kolkata, and I had a good few days of holiday, having fun with my parents and grandparents.

Another long-forgotten entity reared its head in this time – my NCA classes. The organizing committee (composed of students from the writing club) had been entirely unable to find a teacher for the entirety of my first semester, and the first two months of the second. Now, they had found an accomplished writer – Ms. Bhargavi Kumaran, author of Kannagi, a feminist retelling of the story of Kannagi and Kovalan from the Tamil epic Silappadhikaram. She is extremely talented and immensely knowledgeable about every aspect of the writing process – from finding a premise, to planning a plot, to writing dialogue, to understanding your characters, all the way up to finding an agent and publishing your novel. She shared some of her knowledge with us, helping those of us in the class hone our skills and gain a deeper understanding of the writing world, over the course of some 15-or-so classes from early April till the beginning of May. I’ll forever be grateful to her, for enriching our lives by giving us her valuable time.

I returned to the institute in April, and we were rushed through the final classes for the semester over the course of the month, finishing up our syllabus as fast as possible. We continued to do iGEM work, of course, and we learned a lot about our project and its related elements.

In the second week of April, rather unfortunately, during a Life Skills lesson, I landed from a jump wrong during a random game (again!), and dislocated and relocated my kneecap. It hurt a lot to fold it, and even to stand on it. Although I was fine cycling for a little while afterwards, by that evening the pain was bad enough that I couldn’t fold my legs enough even to cycle.

It was an awful time. I had to walk or take a bus everywhere, and my classes were quite far away. Still, I persevered, and I managed to adjust. It actually taught me quite a lot about how IITM’s buses worked!

In this period, the iGEM team went out on a visit to a local school, to teach them some concepts of synthetic biology, and raise awareness about iGEM itself. Right afterwards, I went out and got an MRI of my leg – so we could find out exactly what was wrong with it. I was quite proud of how well I handled it – I did it all on my own, with only guidance from my parents over the phone.

Well, the MRI (which I got the next day) told me what I had managed to do – I had sprained most of the ligaments around the kneecap, and got a small tear in my MPFL – the Medial Patello-Femoral Ligament.

Well, that meant no more regular exercise for me – and certainly not Hapkido.

The biggest loss was, in fact, in Hapkido – my belt test was scheduled for the last week of April. I had struggled to attend enough classes to ensure that my attendance was just enough to take part – and now, because of my injury, I couldn’t. I was annoyed, but I resolved to attend the next belt test instead – there was nothing else I could do.

As the end of April approached, we switched over entirely into focusing on our end-of-semester exams.

The exams came and went by in the first two weeks of May. They didn’t go as well as my first semester exams had – I didn’t do too well in Maths, and I had definite doubts in my Chinese exam, but overall, I thought they didn’t go badly.

And then, the semester ended – on May 16. But I didn’t go home – not yet.

The majority of iGEM lab work happened in the summer. This year, we would work in shifts of about a month long, with at least two of us members in campus at all times.

My shift was the first one, from 20^th May till 20^th June. From the 16^th till the 20^th of May, we received lab training from the heads. We were introduced to a few of the most common techniques we would be using in the lab, like culturing and plating cells, using PCR, plasmid isolation and running gel electrophoresis.

After that, the other two members who had the later shift left for their homes, and we began our work.

It was a really fun time – we worked in the lab from 10 AM-5 PM on most days, except the weekends. We weren’t allowed into the lab after 6:00 PM and on weekends. We spent the rest of the time pursuing our own projects, having fun, or doing preparatory work for iGEM. It was an extremely interesting experience, staying at college over the summer break, with no official work, but only self-assigned work or fun lab work.

We achieved quite a lot over the course of a month – we set up future experiments quite effectively, and our initial validation steps - to ensure our equipment and cells were properly set up and our concept would work – were satisfactorily completed.

Finally, on the 20^th of June (a Saturday), I packed up all my stuff, and left the institute with my dad, who had come to pick me up. We spent the night in a hotel, and the next day, we flew back to Kolkata.

And that’s where I will be, till the 20^th of July, when I go back to the institute, to get back to lab work a little early of the semester start (on 24^th July).

My first year of college was an incredible, new, exciting, sometimes concerning but overall, really, really fun experience. I learned a lot, not just academically, but also about life. I hadn’t really known what to expect from college, but what I did get was so good that I think it exceeded any expectations I might have had.

I’ll be back next year, to reveal the details of my second year. I‘m sure it’ll be even more fun than my first!