When I was 15, I was the kind of student who thought very carefully before raising her hand in class. Not because I did not have something to say, mostly because I was afraid of saying it wrong. I would work out in my head whether an answer was good enough before committing to it, and by the time I had decided, the moment had usually passed.I am 21, from Pune, and I am in my fourth year of Chemical Engineering at IIT Gandhinagar. Both my parents are engineers, so in our household, engineering was never an unusual ambition, it was closer to the default. What took longer to figure out was what kind, and what I actually wanted to do with it.I studied at Pawar Public School in Pune until Class 10, then moved to a CBSE school for Classes 11 and 12. I gave JEE Main and JEE Advanced in 2023. When the time came for JoSAA counselling, I went through the curriculum pages of different departments at different institutes, reading actual course structures rather than going purely by reputation. At IIT Gandhinagar, I looked at Electrical Engineering and Materials Science alongside Chemical Engineering. The Chemical Engineering curriculum made sense to me based on what I had enjoyed in school. I chose it.Friends for lifeThe first thing that surprised me about IIT Gandhinagar was the foundation programme. Before academics begin, incoming students spend about four weeks in a set of activities and sports competitions that bring the entire batch together. It was an unusually thoughtful way to start, you are given permission to meet people before the pressure sets in, to build familiarity at a pace that feels natural. The friendships that have stayed with me through all four years were almost entirely formed during those four weeks.In my first year, I got involved in several student-led initiatives to understand how they worked, the cultural fest, TEDx, the Student Leadership Conclave, the technical fest. In my second year, I became a core member of the Finance and Curation team at TEDxIITGandhinagar. The role involved coordinating with speakers, sponsors, and the different teams running the event. Among the speakers we worked with that year were Dutee Chand, Manish Gupta, and Gaurav Juyal.Those conversations, professional, substantive, with people who had built something real, would have seemed completely out of reach to the 15-year-old calculating whether her answer was worth raising her hand for. That was the most visible version of what IIT had changed in me: not one dramatic moment but the accumulation of things I had pushed myself through, until confidence stopped feeling like a decision I had to make and became something more automatic.Story continues below this adIIT Gandhinagar’s academic structure made this possible in a practical sense. Credits can be distributed across semesters, which means you can take a lighter academic load in a particularly demanding semester and spread the more intensive coursework across your third and fourth years. I used that flexibility deliberately, lighter semesters when TEDx or other commitments needed more time, heavier ones when I could give academics the full weight they deserved.Faculty support, and semiconductor researchThe professors have been a consistent part of what has shaped me here. There is a genuine open-door culture, you can walk into an office with a half-formed question and leave with a sharper one. What I value most from my project mentors specifically is that they never let conversations stay at the level of project updates. They kept pushing me back to the more fundamental question: what is the actual problem here, and am I asking the right things about it? That habit of questioning, working downward toward first principles rather than staying at the surface, is something they built in me.The research interests took time to clarify, and the path there was not the one I expected.The summer after my third year, I interned at Cornell University, working on semiconductor research. Semiconductors are the materials at the core of every chip and processor – what makes modern computing possible. My work involved using computer simulations to model how electrons behave at the point where two materials meet inside a device, and how the way atoms are arranged at that boundary ultimately determines how well the device performs.Story continues below this adWhat drew me to it was the completeness of the picture. I could trace the story from the smallest possible scale, the behaviour of individual electrons, through to how atoms arrange themselves in the material, and all the way up to what that means for the device you can hold in your hand. That chain from the most fundamental to the most tangible was what I had been looking for.Hiking, guitar and hostel ligeBetween classes, I am usually in the library or working on research. Evenings go to the gym; I did track events earlier in college and have since moved toward strength training. After dinner, more research.When I need to step away, IIT Gandhinagar has good places for it, Tea Post, the open stretch between the hostels that stays calm at most hours; the campus skywalk around sunset; Laal Minar, a building at the top of a short hike from where you can see the whole campus below. Most often, though, we end up in someone’s hostel room, which requires no planning and usually works out fine. I cook, play the guitar, and have recently developed a weakness for murder-mystery thrillers.One thing college has changed in how I think: I used to believe that if things were not going according to plan, the goal itself was in question. I know now that the goal can stay fixed while the plan changes. There is rarely just one way to reach somewhere. The internship that did not work out was still the internship that pointed me in the right direction. The course I expected to take was not the one I took.The destination is the same.