Study, socialise and much more…

Toast and corn flakes gulped down, morning blues and sleep pushed away, it’s time to check what blocks you have (the study periods are known as blocks). Accordingly, any free time can be spent at the computer centre, the library or back at the `wadas’ (as their hostels are known), catnapping away!

Lunch anytime you want (or can have) between 12.30 and 2.30 pm, the afternoons are earmarked for recreation, campus or community activities. The latter including a visit to the nearby hamlets, chipping in however possible. The evenings are free to study, chat, walk around the campus, whatever. With dinner fortifying them, most students take to their books at night, tackling their “loads of homework” before hitting the sack, often as late as 1 am.

With a five-day week pattern, Saturdays are a treat, with a bus getting them to Pune. Shopping, site-seeing, e-mailing back home – for all this, this is the day. By the time Sunday’s arrived, it’s time to get down to homework pushed away till the last minute!

But there’s more to life here than just fun in freaky clothes. Selected as they are after attaining good scores and tough screening, they all have an academic rep to protect! That entails sheer hard work, not just in classes, but all projects and co-curricular activities too.

As one student quips, “At UWC, you can do three things – sleep, socialise, study. But you are allowed to choose only two”!

For the youngsters, these years are very different from what they’ve been accustomed to. A foreign land, with foreign people and their varied customs, culture, dress sense, food habits, way of speaking, mannerisms, attitudes takes time getting used to. But as they aver, the relaxed college atmosphere, the ensured freedom and privacy, the responsibility that comes consequently, the camaraderie that gradually grows between them makes each day one to cherish.

Which is evident at their social dos when they celebrate together each other’s national occasions in their own tradition. Sharing these moments for two such formative years, it’s no surprise that when it’s time to leave, there’s much more than just a tinge of sadness.