B.Tech 2nd Year at IIT Guwahati
“From sophomore to junior”
This article is a collection of thoughts and events which happened in my second year of B.tech at IIT Guwahati. I will try to share all of the experiences and lessons which I learned in this academic year.
A little bit of context
Hello readers this is probably the first time you read one of my articles. Before moving to the main events below I just want to introduce myself so that you can connect the dots in a better way. I am Swapnal Shahil an undergraduate student at IIT Guwahati, major in Chemical Science and Technology (2019–2023) and I grew up in Patna, capital of Bihar.
Online semester 🙄
Hell yeah! my major part of the third semester gone into taking online lectures, completing assignments, and making pdfs to submit. Sounds like Coursera?? Haha! Well, this is just an advanced version which includes surprise quizzes and Vivas too. In this semester I learned many things related to my course and tried to do well in those courses. Since my courses were easy, I utilized my free time in learning things and developing skills.
My fourth semester was very different and awesome from the third semester as I went back to my college to continue this semester. You must be thinking what awesome here!! Well well well… everything you want you can do there as all the resources are available for you. Apart from this who else will not want to stay in such a beautiful campus. I was happy about my decision to come back to college rather than staying at home. 😀
My evening time was totally devoted to sports. You can find me there in badminton court between 4 pm to 6 pm whenever college reopens.
Also, there was a farewell event which happened in mid of April for Batch of 2021 of our department. Here is one pic of that day.
Ruins of Nalanda
Before coming back to campus in early January I visited the ruins of Nalanda. Though it was not the first time I visited that place. Because I was studying Archaeology at that time which rekindles me to visit that place again. Nalanda University was one of the first universities in the world, founded in the 5th Century BC, and reported to have been visited by the Gautama Buddha during his lifetime. If you are from India you definitely have knowledge about this place. There are so many things I can tell you about this place but keeping it short will be better here now.
Open Source
Starting from my first year I am having great enthusiasm towards open source. My first motivation for open source was Hacktoberfest. I will highly recommend to my juniors to take part in this and win schwag from DigitalOcean. This fest will help you to learn the basics of git and GitHub.
Now when you are an expert in git and GitHub, you will definitely think for Google Summer of Code. At that time I was good in Web Development and my major contributions till before November 2020 were in the front end. So I learned more and get familiar with the open-source community and all GSoC processes. Finally, on May 17 I got mail for proposal acceptance. 😏 Well, there are many motivations for you to try for GSoC. By the way, if you are interested to see my proposal here is a link for that — My-GSoC-Proposal. Also, I am documenting my work and writing blogs here on medium you can check my profile for that.
Back to home 😀
So my fourth semester was going to end and I booked my flight to come back home on April 24. These pics were taken two days before coming back home.
Before ending this article I will like to introduce my friends from the above pic. Starting from left Arihant, Prathamesh, Divy, Ayush, Daksh, me, Vishal, and Devashish.
In the second pic, we were having snacks in Core 5.
What changed this year?
- This year I made vast improvements in taking decisions faster. Also, I started to put more value on time.
- Started doing yoga in the morning.
- Started to write everything related to work.
- Made small plans and implemented them.
