For about eight months in 2023 and 2024, I was living two parallel lives. On the surface, I was a first-year student at MNNIT Allahabad, attending classes, maintaining a decent presence on campus, making sure nothing looked unusual. Underneath that, I was secretly preparing for JEE Advanced all over again, on a schedule I had to hide from almost everyone around me. One wrong conversation and the whole plan would unravel.It worked. In 2024, I secured AIR 8703 in JEE Advanced and got into IIT Guwahati. I am now a third-year student in Biosciences and Bioengineering here.I am a 20-year-old from Prayagraj, and I have performed the coffin dance meme song on guitar for a hall full of professors who had absolutely no idea what was happening.Growing up in PrayagrajMy father works in the banking sector, and my mother is a teacher. I am the youngest in the family, which meant my sister’s textbooks were always within reach. In Class 7, I found her Class 10 trigonometry books and worked through them because I could not help myself. My father would sit with me when I got stuck on math puzzles, and somewhere in those evenings the shape of my future career quietly decided itself.I do not miss Prayagraj, the city. I miss my parents, my sister, and my pet. But Guwahati keeps me occupied enough that homesickness rarely finds a foothold.The first attempt, and what went wrongIn 2023, I appeared for JEE Main and scored 99.2 percentile. Then, for reasons entirely outside my control, a medical situation derailed my JEE Advanced attempt. I ended up with an AIR somewhere in the 17,000s, which, for a General category student, earns you a polite pat on the back and exactly zero seat allocations worth considering.Story continues below this adI joined Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology (MNIT) Allahabad. The college was good, and so were the people. But somewhere inside, I knew I had not finished.Living two livesTaking a partial drop while enrolled at a premier NIT is, to put it mildly, an extreme sport.The challenge was not just the preparation; it was the concealment. I had to keep up with MNNIT coursework, appear engaged, maintain a normal social presence on campus, and simultaneously run a JEE Advanced preparation schedule that I could not tell a single person about. The moment anyone found out, the pressure would multiply in ways I did not want to manage.I studied in the margins of the day — before class, after everyone else had gone to bed, and in whatever quiet moments I could find. Some stretches tested everything I had. But having done this once before gave me a sense of what the preparation demanded. I had a map to follow, even if I was still drawing it as I went.In 2024, I reappeared for JEE Advanced and secured AIR 8703.Story continues below this adWhy Biosciences and Bioengineering? BSBE sits at an intersection of disciplines that appealed to me precisely because it does not trap you in one direction. The engineering foundation it provides is real, but it also leaves room to build on the side: software development, machine learning, data analytics. I wanted a branch that would not close doors before I had figured out which ones I wanted to walk through.Arriving at IIT GuwahatiI arrived on campus on July 22, 2024. Being the youngest in my family, leaving home for the first time, 1,200 kilometres away, was a bigger deal than I let on. I remember setting up my room, meeting my roommate for the first time, and watching my parents cry as they left.That image has stayed with me.The campus stunned me almost immediately. The lakes, the greenery, the ducklings wandering around like they owned the place. I was genuinely mesmerised. Then, a few days later, I went to Paltan Bazaar, a major market area in the city, and found ducklings on a dinner menu.The guitar roomI had carried my guitar from home as a stress-relief habit from my JEE mock test days, and it ended up becoming social infrastructure. Within the first few weeks, my room turned into an informal gathering point; people would drift in after dinner and stay to listen.Story continues below this adI fell ill a few times in those early months, and the same people who had been coming over for the music never left my side when I needed them. That is when I understood that the friendships I was making here were going to last.Clubs, astronomy and the ‘coffin dance’ memeI initially tried to stay out of clubs. Then the fear of missing out made its case convincingly. I am now part of Anchorenza, the anchoring, public speaking, and content creation club, Equinox, the astronomy club, and TEDxIITGuwahati, among others. I also performed as a guitarist in campus bands and played for Alcheringa, the cultural fest.The most memorable performance was when our band played Astronomia (an electronic dance track by Russian artist Tony Igy) for an audience of more than 100 people, including several professors who looked genuinely bewildered throughout. We did it entirely because we could.Joining SWB for the gossip, leaving as Events HeadI joined the Students’ Welfare Board primarily to stay informed about what was happening on campus. The inside information pipeline was excellent. What I did not plan for was finding the work genuinely interesting.Story continues below this adI eventually sat through a four-hour interview and came out the other end as Events Head. The role pulled me into things I had never expected: managing the launch of a new Burger King outlet on campus, drafting 20-page rulebooks for the Sahyog inter-hostel competition and, in January 2026, helping organise and host the Pan-IIT Wellbeing Summit at IIT Guwahati.Coordinating schedules across all the IITs was a masterclass in crisis management — and in learning not to lose your composure in a group chat with 40 people. Taking on that kind of responsibility changes you in ways that are difficult to articulate until you realise you have already changed.On GuwahatiThe city rewards curiosity. The Brahmaputra in winter, the stillness of it, the way the light sits on the water, is a genuine reset. Fancy Bazar is a cheap alternative to online shopping where you can find duplicates of almost anything at a fraction of the price.Uzan Bazaar has good cafes, though the prices are optimistic for a student’s pocket. And whatever is open at 2 am becomes, by default, the best food on campus.Story continues below this adThe campus itself is a 700-acre bubble, separated enough from the city that the culture inside it becomes unusually self-contained. While my friends at city colleges go home after class, IIT Guwahati’s real life begins at around 6 pm and has no fixed end time.Looking aheadI want to work at the intersection of technology and business strategy, building products that use software development and predictive modelling to solve real logistical problems. The combination of a BSBE foundation with the technical skills I have been building on the side feels like the right toolkit for it. I have also recently found trading genuinely interesting, so that is something I am following carefully.One thing IIT has taught me — though I would never say this to a professor’s face — is that engineering is largely the art of learning an entire semester’s worth of content the night before an exam. I say this with respect and firsthand experience.But what it has also taught me is that the version of yourself you plan to be when you arrive is seldom the person you actually become. I came to IIT Guwahati with a study plan. I left my first year with a coffin dance performance, an Events Head title I had never intended to hold, and a room that permanently smelled of guitar strings and late-night Maggi.I would not trade any of it.