My college days are about to end, and I feel really old looking back at the hectic three years that I’ve spent as an FYUP student. I still remember the time when my boards were about to end. I come from a small town and it’s easy to opt for Science in class 11th there thinking you will be able to handle it just like everyone else. But it never really happens according to the plan, which is why I decided on following my passion and pursuing English Honours right after boards ended.

This wouldn’t come as a surprise to many, but my only choice was Delhi University. Unaware of the entire overhaul of the system, I had complete faith thinking nothing would be better than being a DU student as an undergrad. I couldn’t have been more wrong. If I say that the last three years were difficult for me because of an entire new system, it would be an understatement. The last three years were exhausting, sapped me off my entire energy every single day, and made me question ‘did I ever deserve this?’

Maybe there are other FYUP students who do not agree with me. But, let’s start with measuring the flaws that the entire system had which affected us majorly. Our entire first year was wasted in pursuing Foundation Courses, something that we should have never been done at college level at all. A lot of colleges conducted FC classes after 12 which affected our college timetable the most. In CVS, my first lecture started at 9 in the morning and college ended for me at 4:30 in the evening, making it almost difficult to manage anything. Nearly all students attended college till evening thinking that attendance mattered, and after one year a notice was issued that attendance isn’t an issue for us at all.

Let’s talk about the course structure. B. Tech courses were started without being given a single thought. Shaurya Sahai, a 3^rd year B.Tech student of Hans Raj College said, ‘In such a competitive world, we put trust in DU and now it has landed us in such a messed up situation.  We have no proper infrastructure, no proper course structure; labs are in a condition which cannot, at any cost, enable an engineering student to perform practicals properly. We have to take care of our studies and how should we cover up for the things that we haven’t been taught and then there are issues like AICTE approval which divert our attention because we are fighting for it. University is chilling and has no concern for the 2500 students.’

Other courses like Economics Honours, English Honours, B.Com Honours, were improperly structured, with a lot of important papers getting deleted from the syllabus. When FYUP was rolled back, our third year became exceedingly difficult with an abundance of subjects and no proper teachers to provide the right kind of cohesion needed. This is true especially for English Honours where each paper is being taught by 3-4 teachers, mostly ad-hoc, perpetually failing to strike a balance between all the books and teaching us in the right order. The restructuring also deleted an important DC-1 paper that taught us about research methodology, thus defeating the purpose of enrolling in an Honours course.

We never really had a ‘back’ system, and mostly were not failed. Thanks to this norm, we lost any kind of motivation whatsoever to study our subjects sincerely. After asking a lot of students from different colleges, I was convinced that it was not just the University, but professors as well who wanted to get rid of us because we are just a batch of students meant for experiments alone.

Thank you Delhi University for considering us as guinea pigs that you needed for your experiments. And for giving us this life where we don’t know what we did in the past three years because of the improper structure, never really learnt the importance of marks, assignments, attendance, and are not even close to being proper graduates (according to the course we pursued) who can be recruited.

Sudisha Misra

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