Mystory@Shivi Vats: How I selected my course and college for my chosen career path

Mystory@Shivi Vats

I have always been passionate about computers for as long as I can remember. My family got our first computer when I was 6 years old and with the help of my parents I started to learn how to operate it, though it was mostly used for playing games. I preferred video games to outdoor sports and I spent most of my evenings in front of the computer screen. As years passed, my love for computers grew more and more and in IX standard I decided that I would become a game developer.

I remember having visited a renowned career counsellor when I was in X standard. He had a big list of viable career options in the country, and game development was nowhere to be found in the list. He told me to circle all the jobs I found interesting and

I had to write “game developer” separately and circle it then. My parents got a little worried about me wanting to have a job that was not even available in the country, but thankfully they never pressurized me to get into any specific career.

I chose PCM with C++ as my stream for class XI and XII and chose BTech (CSE) in IIIT Una @ NIT Hamirpur over other alternatives because I refused to do engineering in any branch other than CSE (Computer Science & Engineering), even though this college is 10 hours away from my home. I did consider going abroad for a game development undergraduate course, but they offered only diplomas, so I decided against it. My plan now is to pursue a post-graduation course in game development after I complete my BTech.

How I cracked admission @ NIT Hamirpur

After my class XII boards were over, I appeared for a lot of entrance exams for a lot of different colleges and universities. To get admission into NIT Hamirpur (Himachal Pradesh), I had to take the JEE Mains exam, as the

AIR was calculated by taking into account both the JEE Main score and the board exams percentage. I started coaching for the JEE Mains and JEE Advanced exams from the start of my XI class from Vidyamandir Classes (VMC), Anand Vihar branch in Delhi. As I had to score well in board exams too, I started going to a tuition for boards in the July of 2013 (my XII class). Eventually, I couldn’t cope up with the pressure of going to both VMC and tuition and scoring well in both, so I decided to drop out of VMC in the next month. Thankfully, my parents were very supportive in this matter and did not put any pressure on me to continue with coaching classes. The tuition helped me a lot in studying for my boards and created an atmosphere of friendly competition due to most of my friends going to the same teacher. After my board exams were over, I joined a 15-day crash course for JEE Mains in Narayanas, East Delhi branch. All of this helped me score well in both the board exams and the JEE Mains exam which finally got me admission into this college. Apart from the college I’m currently studying in, I was trying out for NSIT (Netaji Subhash Institute of Technology), DTU (Delhi Technological University), NIT Kurukshetra, IIIT Sonepat, VIT (Vellore Institute of Technology), MIT (Maharashtra Institute of Technology), SRM University, Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam Technical University, Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University and Jamia Millia Islamia college.

My college life: Things I like and what I would want to change

Most of my college time is spent in the hostel room as it is a residential campus. Other than attending classes, I roam around the campus a lot because it is a 320 acre campus and most of it is filled with trees (as it’s in Himachal Pradesh). There are a lot of places to just sit down and chat and several food stalls like Nescafe, Amul, Verka etc to grab a bite when hungry. There is a big ground too but I’m not much into sports so I don’t go there often.

As I said before, I am a CSE freak, so pretty much any class related to the CSE field interest me. We do have a lot of non-departmental subjects such as Behavioural Science, Economics, Environmental Studies etc and I don’t

like studying these at all. I haven’t scored above a C in any of the subjects not belonging to CSE. I can’t simply mug up anything I don’t have interest in.

As I mentioned, I don’t like outdoor sports, so extra-curricular outdoor activities are not a big part of my life. But I do like to play snooker/pool a lot. I spend most of my time in front of my laptop, but rarely it is for anything productive.

As I am from Noida, I find the atmosphere here very different from my home. And I don’t mean the physical atmosphere, I mean the infrastructure and the way of life here. There is not much to do here except roaming around in the campus and so I find myself wanting to go home very often. If given a chance, I’d like to be able to go home on every weekend, so I can enjoy myself the most.

Also, the weather here is very cold, especially during the winter months and I have contracted an allergy to the college weather because of having to suffer from a running nose for months. I’d desperately like to change that.

My college has given me a lot of new friends and experiences, some of which I will never forget. I have become more confident and have overcome my stage fright. I’ve learnt that you shouldn’t trust a lot of people and that in the end everyone wants to profit from a situation, be it your closest friends. But most of all, I’d say that the way I study has changed. I used to gradually study concepts over the year as they were taught but now I have almost mastered the skill of learning a whole subject comprehensively the night before the exam, and forgetting most of it after the exam gets over!

About the Author:

First of all, I’d like to thank Shiksha for providing me with a platform to publish Mystory. I have always been passionate about computer science but out of all the fields in or related to computer science, game development was what interested me the most. I’m working on making it into the game development industry, and hopefully own and run a game studio of my own someday.