Five days left for my end-semester exams.
Funny thing is, the exams are probably smaller than the amount of overthinking I've done staring at my ceiling at 2 AM these past few weeks.
A week ago I was shipping a cool feature at work. Fully locked in. Now I'm on hiatus from all of that, sitting with textbooks and highlight markers. The context switch from production code to exam prep never stops feeling weird.
Somewhere between preparing for another paper and cleaning out old folders on my laptop, I started thinking about my BTech life as a whole. Not some curated reflection. Just life. What it actually felt like to live through engineering.
The Studious Kid Who Didn't Want Studious to Be His Whole Thing
I've been studious my whole life. Not the topper, rank 1, gold medal kind. More like the rank 3 kind. Always around the top but never obsessing over it. 96.6% in 10th boards. 95.6% in 12th. Textbook smart, always have been.
That carried into college too. Skipped more classes than I'd like to admit, but always made sure I learned everything on my own.
But I made a conscious effort to never let academics become my entire personality.
Let me be clear though: I genuinely study. I'm not one of those people who dismiss theory or act like college is useless. I give my exams honestly. I try to understand concepts deeply. I give it everything I can.
But if you've gone through the Indian education system, you know there's a very specific game around exams.
You go through previous year questions. Recognize patterns. Memorize the type of answers professors usually expect. You can score pretty well without fully understanding how engineering works in the real world.
Not saying that judgmentally. It's just true.
I've seen people score incredibly well while having almost no practical intuition about systems, products, architecture, or how software development actually works outside a classroom.
I never wanted to become that person.
Optimizing for Learning, Then Optimizing for Marks
Over time, I built a balance.
Most of my semester is spent optimizing for learning. Not marks. Sharpening my analytical thinking. Actually understanding why something works the way it does instead of memorizing the answer format. The "why" behind things, not just the "what."
Then right before exams? Sure, I optimize. Previous year papers, pattern recognition, strategic studying. Grades still matter to some extent. Pretending otherwise is just fake intellectualism.
But exam optimization was never going to be my entire definition of engineering.
Because somewhere early on, I realized something a lot of engineering students learn the hard way: theory alone doesn't make you an engineer.
Enter: A Bronx Tale
Weirdly enough, one of the movies that shaped this for me was A Bronx Tale.
If you've watched it, you know the central dynamic. A kid grows up around two father figures. His actual father is a hardworking bus driver who believes in discipline, honesty, education, doing things the right way. The other is Sonny, the gangster. Understands the streets, people, risk, survival, how the real world operates.
Obviously I'm not comparing startups to the mafia before LinkedIn recruiters start panicking.
But the duality in that movie hit me hard. Engineering feels exactly like that sometimes.
College teaches you one side. Startups teach you the other.
One side gives you operating systems, DBMS, computer networks, algorithms, theory that genuinely matters. I mean that sincerely. Fundamentals are important. People love pretending theory is useless until they hit a real scalability issue and suddenly rediscover why distributed systems exist.
Then there's the other side.
Deadlines are real. Code breaks in production. Users don't care how elegant your architecture diagram looked in class. You push fixes at midnight and learn more in two weeks than you did in an entire semester.
That side changed me.
Half My BTech, Spent Building
I started working in September 2024. If I count an MVP I built for a local startup, technically July 2024.
That's almost half my BTech spent balancing academics with actual industry work.
That combination taught me more than either side could have alone.
Two startups so far. Features built end-to-end. Not tutorial projects. Real features with real users, requirements, bugs, iterations, feedback loops, and all the chaos that comes with shipping actual software.
There's something humbling about seeing code leave your laptop and become part of someone's workflow.
In college, your code gets evaluated. In startups, your code gets used.
Very different feeling.
One thing I'm genuinely proud of: I became financially independent in college itself. I'm not the most materialistic guy, but there's a different kind of satisfaction in buying things you've dreamed about with money you earned. Not asking anyone. Just working, earning, getting there on your own terms.
You Need Both Fathers
That's what A Bronx Tale made me reflect on.
The movie never says one father was right and the other wrong. The kid needed both perspectives to understand life.
That's exactly how I see engineering now.
Classrooms gave me structure. Startups gave me intuition.
College taught me how systems work. Building in the real world taught me why systems fail.
One taught me how to think. The other taught me how to adapt.
The best mentors I've had weren't just people who knew technology deeply. They knew people deeply. How to ship, communicate, simplify problems, handle pressure, make decisions with incomplete information.
That kind of learning doesn't fit inside a syllabus.
The Sweet Spot
It's easy during engineering to fall into extremes.
Some people only chase grades and never build anything outside class. Others only chase hustle culture and ignore fundamentals entirely.
The sweet spot is in the middle.
You need the discipline of studying things properly even when they feel abstract. You also need the messiness of actually building things in the real world.
Because eventually, engineering stops being about exams. It becomes about solving problems for real people under real constraints with real consequences.
Looking back at my BTech now, I'm grateful I didn't pick just one side.
Grateful for the nights spent studying subjects I complained about. Equally grateful for the nights debugging production issues while wondering why one missing environment variable had the power to destroy my peace.
Both mattered.
A Bronx Tale wasn't about choosing between two fathers. It was about learning what to take from each of them.
That's exactly what my engineering journey has been too.