Wake up!

By now, we’ve all finished considerable amount of coursework in this college. So, we’re all well into the brand “NITT”. So, give yourself a pat on the back for getting through the rat race of getting into one of the best colleges in the country for technical education.

Before going any further, just stop and think. Think where you’re headed. Think what you’re doing. Most importantly, think if you’re happy. While definition of happiness changes from person to person, it is important that we keep revaluating our happiness quotient in this increasingly changing world.

We need to go through a thought process called “waking up to oneself”. When it’s really quite simple on the outset, the challenge is to take the elementary ideas farther and form a complex picture of ourselves, a picture that extends far beyond the simple boundaries of the education system.

We all need to start this thought process not by routine or asking ourselves a questionnaire but by realizing the presence of ourselves in a world where there are at least a thousand other people who have the same resume as you do. This is where we need to extend ourselves beyond resumes and grades and try reaching a greater height in what people call “personal satisfaction”.

When having a college degree and a rich resume helps one fetch jobs and set a career, very few of us dare to think beyond the idea of a “stepping stone”. The sad truth is that in the process of getting ‘educated’, we marginalize the importance we should be giving to ourselves and our uniqueness. Most of us have actually changed the idea of what we think is important to us through the process of ‘standardized education’.

Looking back at the time we spent in college, one must see a development of character and more importantly, the development of an idea of what one actually wants to do in life. The decision about the future should happen more out of choice than out of compulsion. While it is disheartening to see that more people “shift lanes” after completing engineering, it should be seen as an indicator the sense of “cluelessness” that people are in when they make major career choices.

While the fact remains that an engineering degree at NITT offers you’re a great chance of ending up at a high paying job, the sad truth is that most of the people who go through the process of “educating” themselves, lose themselves more than they can imagine.

It is not even in the hour of death after one gets “offer letters” that one is able to wake up to oneself and find what he actually wants. However easy it may sound, it is impossible to wake up to oneself overnight or settle down happily to the idea of working at a company that picked you from 200 other people because you suit their job better than the others. The most important thing from a personal point of view has to be whether the job suits you more than the million other career paths that you could choose.

So, if you’re still in your early days and haven’t really decided where to go after NITT, start thinking already. Because “waking up to oneself” is a process and not a decision to be made. It needs time. So, give it a thought.
ps : It is true that "survival" plays a major role in life decisions, but at least open your eyes to things and pursue them as a hobby if not anything else. The most important thing here is "self satisfaction" :-)