Let’s be clear on the motivation for a blog like this: every 12th grader in India after his/her exams faces the choice of which college or branch to join. Specifically in India, it is generally the marks which decide which college a student joins. Not interest, not future chances, mostly just perception from students and parents.

Although some of that perception is based on fact and employability, it’s a decision which is made with research almost limited to talking with a couple of relatives or friends. Or worse, posting the query on an online discussion group and making your decisions on the basis of the replies you get on there.

I don’t pretend to be the yoda of career choices, nor do I pretend to be right on most occasions. I’m just gonna tell you what I did, how I felt about it, how my feelings evolved over my journey at IIT Bombay and how, as I look back after 5 years, my priorities and interests evolved. If you’re someone still confused about what you wanna do in life, welcome to my boat.

AIR 3403. Not too great for IIT Bombay. Not too bad for my relatives still star-struck by the glow of IITB. I had a choice between IIT-B/IIT-M Meta and Elec at BITS Pilani. I liked Mumbai. Have lived there most of my life. The choice was purely geographic. IIT Bombay Dual Degree in Metallurgical Engineering and Materials Science was where I was headed.

I honestly had zero clue about what I was getting into. No one ever told me what the branch entails. The only thing I was marginally interested in my first year was finance or business, my interests couldn’t be further away from MEMS(short for Metall…, you get the idea ;)).

Here’s the meta department from the eyes of undergraduates for the newbies- its a bunch of core courses disparate from each other, wrapped in a series of laboratories which mostly involve polishing a metal and looking at it under a microscope- or more appropriately, watching someone else do the same thing as you idly play PubG or scroll instagram. It isn’t the most challenging, can be interesting on some days if taught well and gives you a lot of free time. That’s about it.

Free time. Yes. All I did in most of my free time was waste it. Kind of. IIT Bombay does offer the amenities and the people so that there is no boring moment. I spent most of my first 2 years dabbling with things ranging from debate to cinematography to football to a wee bit of tech/code. For some reason, I expected to have found my passion by my second year, but I clearly had not. I was still largely unsure of what I wanted to do- 2 years into a degree program.

3rd year brings in the internship season. Here’s something about IITians in general- they probably do not know what they want to do ahead in life, but one thing they don’t want hapening is being left behind. And when you have no clue what you want to do in the future, you apply everywhere.

At that point, I went from someone looking for my so called “passion” to someone looking for the easiest way out. I had half baked academics, and decent interviewing skills… that’s about it. Got plenty of rejections(read ‘all’). Decided to upskill myself on what the market wanted at that point in time, Machine Learning.

Here’s ML for newbies- you build a machine that takes in input data, keep banging/stretching/shaking the machine till it somehow gets you something good. Then you add that to your resume. For some reason, it stuck. I wasn’t the greatest coder in my batch, nor was I a math whiz. But ML just seemed right. It had a visceral understanding to it that I could imagine, tweak in my mind. Moreover, most of what I learnt was online, which traditionally implies excellent teaching + self motivation, ie. I was hooked.

That was probably the only time in my 5 years at IIT Bombay where I was sure what I wanted to do- Machine Learning. I managed to scramble an internship in ML, and was fairly certain that this was the holy grail I was looking for. This was the passion I long looked for. The violin to my Beethoven, the bat to my Sachin , the …….wait let me not get ahead of myself.

Long story short, I started doing more ML. Then more ML. A few more courses, a couple of hackathons. Until I went back to Stage 1. Cluelessness.

Here’s something about passion. A paradox. By the time someone realizes something is his passion, he is already deep into it, too deep to swim out of it. No newbie said swimming was his passion after grade 1. The more I went deeper into ML, the more I realised core tech, or the deeper realms of ML were something I either had no experience in, or something I had no interest in.

The longer you stay in the ocean, the more you think you belong to the sea. Not because you really do, but because it’s difficult to swim back to land. Add to that the sunk cost fallacy. Having invested 2 years of my life swimming after the ship named ML, I was so deep in the ocean that the easier option for me was to climb into the boat, not swim back to the land of different possibilities.

So where were we? Yes. I went from stage 1- clueless, to stage 2 - ML is love, to kind of stage 1 again. I liked ML as I looked at it from the periphery, but I was fairly certain I didn’t want to dive deep. Also keep in mind, I was almost 4.5 years into my degree in Materials Science at this point in time, with a job in sort of ML in hand(one privilege which IIT gives you is an endless array of job options). I also dabbled with research in Meta, but realised research or a phd was something definitely out of my reach- I didn’t have the perseverance.

So as I write this, here’s something which remains true irrespective of where this story leads ahead for my life. Irrespective of how many contrary or independent experiences you have, the skills are transferable. I joined debate largely because I wanted to speak and think well- speaking and presentations have helped me in every field I’ve been in, be it academics or corporate. The mathematics involved in my foray into ML have helped me in my research in my core Meta field. Football is probably the only thing that kept me sane through all these all-nighters. Point being, it’s ok to not know where you’re going as long as you collect value along the road.

I don’t mean to be a promoter of the Don’t-find-your-passion club. All I’m saying is it’s okay to not know what you wanna do- even at 25. Most people don’t. But if you stop experimenting or looking for it, you will definitely won’t find it. You may not either way, but if you keep looking for it, you will learn a lot along the way. That will keep you sane.

So yeah, that’s about it. I’m still not sure about what I wanna do. Maybe you’re on the same boat- at least most of you are. Just remember there are many paths, and most lead to cool places. It’s just a matter of finding one/many which don’t suck the life out of you.