Always learn from your failures. This is the biggest lesson that my journey has taught me.
I was a student who couldn’t clear JEE Mains in his first attempt and later went on to receive 5th rank in a Pan India coding competition. Now that I look back, I am the sum of all the failures and rejections I have faced to date.
Even before this competition, I participated in an inter-district coding competition in the 12th class. I ended up securing 1st rank in this competition. For a 17-year old boy, who was just testing his luck in this field, you can imagine how huge this must have been. I mean I did take CS as an additional subject in 11th class and enjoyed learning C++. But bagging the first rank was nothing short of a surprise. At that time, this early achievement of mine motivated me way too much to encompass in words. It made me aware of my capabilities which I had always neglected. Due to this, I took the CS branch in college as well.
While this was a motivator, I couldn’t clear JEE Mains. I had to drop a year before I made it to IIIT Bhubaneswar. I was devastated during that time as I was not satisfied with my college. My friends, who had already been in college for a year by then, told me that as long as I didn’t compromise with my efforts, college’s name didn’t really count. I also learned from a few seniors that the only things that majorly varied in different tier colleges were the level of opportunities and placements.
Because I knew this early on, I decided that if college didn’t offer us enough opportunities, I would create opportunities on my own. In my first year, an MNC- Kronos organized a Pan India competition called Kronothon. It was a two-stage competition. In the first stage, they selected 100 people out of 7000 participants from all over India. For the 100 people selected, there was an offline competition subsequently. I participated in this competition and bagged 5th rank in this competition.
I know these tiny achievements might seem insignificant but for a student who came from a small town in UP, these were too good to be true. The subtle motivations of these tiny wins pushed me to keep doing better.
By my third year, the lack of opportunities was starting to hinder my progress which made me look for other options. That’s when I joined Scaler’s course. Before Scaler, I used to practice on InterviewBit and solved 150+ problems there. While solving these problems, my friend circle helped me a lot. We all used to practice together and help each other if we got stuck in any problem.
During Scaler’s online course, I got exposed to a whole range of different concepts. I understood them all quite well as the faculty was pretty good. The most different part was the inclusion of system designs. I wasn’t even introduced to this concept in my college and I knew that freshers are usually not required to give system designs’ round. Truth be told, I had initially decided to skip it altogether as it wasn’t relevant to me. But when I started attending its classes, I understood exactly how important it was. Even though we weren’t supposed to crack the system designs’ round I knew that this kind of knowledge would go a long way for me.
When the process of interviews started, the rejections naturally tagged along. Initially, I used to view these rejections as personal failures. But with the help of my mentor- Mr. Gaurav, my mindset changed. I started to realize that I was learning something from every rejection. It was because I took these rejections in my stride that I was able to learn which are the parts that needed improvement. I cracked interviews for a few companies and ended up at Compass.
On that note, I can’t help but say again- always learn from your failures. They will only help you become a better version of yourself.