When I was at IIT Tirupati for my brother's admission, I met two students who had also secured admission for the 2025 BTech batch. Both of them were busy on their laptops while waiting in the document verification queue. One was working on a dataset in the Jupyter Notebook. I didn’t get a chance to talk to him much. The other was grinding problems on Codeforces. I had a conversation with him, bro was grinding competitive programming right after finishing his 12th boards and JEE. He’s already 1300 rated. This just shows how some students from Tier 1 colleges are extremely aware and proactive when it comes to computer science and machine learning. And this level of awareness and initiative at such an early stage is honestly inspiring, it sets the tone for the kind of peers and competition you’ll encounter in such institutions.

After the final round, HR said she’d get back to me. A week passed—nothing. I followed up, and she said “Your application is on hold, we’re looking for someone with 3 years experience.” Like... seriously? WTF.