When I was preparing for JEE from home in a small Haryana village, there was no one around me who had done it before. No senior to call, no neighbour to compare notes with, no map. I figured it out largely on my own. Today, as president of the Students’ Gymkhana at IIT Kanpur, most of what I do is be exactly that person for someone else – the one who helps you find the path when you can’t see it yet.
I am 20 years old, in my fourth year of BTech in Civil Engineering at IIT Kanpur. My day usually begins around 9 am with classes and labs, and the afternoons shift entirely into meetings, discussions, student issues, and planning for whatever is coming up next on campus. Evenings are for friends, for walking the green campus, for sitting on a hostel rooftop or grabbing something at the Chowpatty or OAT. From the outside, it doesn’t look like a routine, but there is a rhythm to it, and in these years, this place has become more home to me than almost anywhere else.
Growing up in Dhamlawas
I come from Dhamlawas, a quiet village in the Rewari district of Haryana. I did my schooling at Nav Jyoti Senior Secondary School in Pithrawas, a neighbouring village, which is where I built my foundation in mathematics and science. My father is a practicing advocate at the district court in Rewari, and my mother is a homemaker.
The fact that my father is in law and I chose engineering is something I think about sometimes, and the thing I am most grateful for is that my parents never once pushed me in any particular direction. They backed every decision I made and gave me the freedom to follow my own interests. That is not something every student gets, and I do not take it for granted.
There is nothing grand about the village itself that I miss. What I miss is my family, and my grandmother, most of all.
Finding out what JEE is
My first real exposure to JEE came in Class 11, when my elder sister was preparing for it. That is honestly how I even got to know what the exam was. Once I understood what it led to and what was possible, I enrolled at the start of Class 12 in PhysicsWallah’s online batch and attended their lectures alongside my regular school classes. I did my entire JEE preparation from home.
The coaching educators were brilliant, but preparing entirely from home, from a village, came with its own particular challenge: I was the first person from Dhamlawas to ever clear JEE Main and JEE Advanced and make it to an IIT.
There was nobody ahead of me. No senior to call when I was stuck, no peer to discuss a doubt with, no one to even tell me whether I was on the right track. When everyone around you is doing something completely different, doubt sets in quickly.
There were moments I wondered whether I should have gone to an offline coaching setup instead. But the comfort of being at home with my family was something I would not have traded, and in the end, that environment steadied me more than any classroom might have.
Why civil engineering
When JoSAA counselling came around, I made a deliberate choice to stay away from the trending tech branches: CSE, AI, and the rest. Core engineering is what genuinely interested me, and Civil in particular pulled me for a reason I can trace back to my childhood: watching Gurgaon rise. Growing up near it, I saw a city transform from almost nothing into a full metropolitan hub practically within my lifetime.
Watching the roads, the buildings, the infrastructure emerging from the ground fascinated me in a way that made Civil Engineering feel less like a branch choice and more like an obvious answer. You can see the impact of what you build. That mattered to me.
Landing a seat in IIT Kanpur
I joined IIT Kanpur in July 2023. It was my first time stepping out of my family’s space into a completely new environment, and the first few weeks were genuinely overwhelming. The academic pace was fast, the hostel was nothing like home, and the mess food was very far from my mother’s cooking.
What made settling in far easier was how IIT Kanpur is built socially. Even before I arrived on campus, I was assigned a student guide, a senior who was there for whatever I needed, big or small. Just knowing someone was reachable made a real difference. Then there is the wing system: 25 to 30 of us live together on one wing, and those wing-mates slowly become family. Before long, the hostel stopped feeling like a place I was staying and started feeling like somewhere I actually wanted to be.
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From Antaragni to the Gymkhana
I got involved in campus life early. I joined the organising team for Antaragni, our cultural festival, and then the President’s Office, where I worked closely with some of the most talented and driven seniors I had encountered. Over time, I became deeply active in the Students’ Gymkhana, which conducts events across the campus.
One thing I want people to know about is the General Championship, which is organised by the Gymkhana. If you have seen Chhichhore, it is something like what the film shows, except ours is significantly bigger and a great deal more intense. Every hall competes across technical, cultural, and sports events throughout the entire year. It is the kind of competition you get to be part of once in a lifetime.
Balancing academics with all of this was genuinely difficult. I made it a personal rule to finish coursework and assignments on time, and gave whatever remained to my friends and the Gymkhana. Over three years, I have gone from being a first-year student who did not know a single person on campus, to serving as president of the Students’ Gymkhana.
What the faculty actually does
People know IIT Kanpur professors for their research and teaching, but there is a side of the faculty that rarely gets spoken about. On this campus, the faculty also runs the administration. They head offices as deans, lead institute-wide initiatives, and hold positions that quietly drive how the place functions. Because of my role in the Gymkhana, most of my interaction with the faculty has been on this side, sitting down to discuss new frameworks, smooth the execution of events, and think through welfare initiatives.
Watching professors move between being world-class researchers and hands-on administrators who genuinely care about what student life feels like has been one of the more surprising parts of my time here. They often go well beyond what their role requires.
Stepping off campus
Last summer, I completed an internship at Experion Developers, a major real estate firm. It was the first time I saw what my branch actually looks like outside the classroom: on-site project management, safety protocols, corporate work culture, the gap between a textbook and a construction floor.
The IIT Kanpur alumni network played its own quiet role in this journey too. At one point, when I needed guidance for a project, I reached out to an alumnus in a senior position at a top firm. He replied within a day, purely because of the shared IIT Kanpur connection, and mentored me over a call. That kind of access is not something I could have expected otherwise.
What IIT actually teaches you
The most valuable thing IIT Kanpur has taught me is something I did not expect to learn here: you do not need to be the smartest person in the room. You need to be the most resilient. Hard work and the ability to adapt will take you further than being the brightest student in any lecture hall. I came from a village where nobody had cracked JEE before, where there was no one to show the way. That required a kind of stubbornness I did not know I had. IIT sharpened it.
What lies ahead
After my BTech, I see myself in the real estate sector, staying true to my branch and contributing to the country’s infrastructure. In some ways, it comes back to where this interest started: watching a city rise from the ground. I want to be part of what comes next.
Looking back, the journey from a village school in Rewari to the president’s chair of the Gymkhana at IIT Kanpur has been something I could not have mapped out when I started. Nobody in Dhamlawas had done it before me, which meant I had to build the map as I went. I am glad I did.
People know IIT Kanpur professors for their research and teaching, but there is a side of the faculty that rarely gets spoken about: Inside IIT Kanpur (Image via special arrangement) 
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