On College Students

As a school kid, I was always fascinated by meeting college students from top tier colleges.

There was something surreal in the way they talked and they confidently stood with T-shirts proudly proclaiming the name of their alma mater. I used to have the impression that no matter what came in the future, there was a certain justification of their abilities and intelligence. Perhaps society had conditioned me to think as such. Maybe their apparent confidence was a just a projection of how I thought it would feel to be in a top tier college.

It struck me just recently that everyone in my college is of the same surreal breed I used to look upto. But now, the magic is lost on me. It's no longer the case that simply being admitted to a Tier-1 college would give one opportunities otherwise impossible. At the same time, the name of the college on your degree matters little if you haven't done enough legwork in college to justify being called an "Engineer".