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Here is a much need reality check on how college life needs more effort, gives more competition and how we need to shed our high school persona to face all this.

NBC once used to air a sitcom called Community. Let me tell you a little something about one of its lead characters, Troy Barnes. Troy who was a high school jock but at Greendale College, hardly anyone raises a brow seeing him. It’s initially disappointing but eventually Troy finds his weird bunch of friends and enjoys his life of leading the “not so popular” student life in college.

High school is a pretty interesting phase for the students. Apart from normal humble introverts and extroverts, the highlights of every school are its star students, the trophy kissing champions, the high-ranking class toppers, the big mouthed debaters, artists, writers, quizzers and so on.

However, if the competition gets less and it hardly puts sweat on one’s brow, then one might succumb to pride and arrogance. It is quite natural. That’s what makes us human after all. Luckily after high school, if you get enrolled in an educational institution like the University of Delhi, it becomes an enlightening destination for a much-needed reality check. Be it Ramjas College or Delhi College of Arts and Commerce , Gargi College or Shri Ram College of Commerce, the colleges of the University of Delhi recruit fine students from all over the country, students who have shown mastery in academics, sports or co-curricular activities. But it takes time for freshers to understand that this mastery helped them gain entry in heir desired college but this would not help them survive in the next three  years of their undergraduate course. For that, we will need to be persistent with our areas of expertise.

Many ex-head boys and head girls, school toppers, the ones that might have worn the ‘Mr’ and ‘Miss Popular’ sash in their farewell, would feel disillusioned because the world of college needs starting over. Nobody would care that much about your past achievements either because they themselves might have had better feathers on their cap or simply because they don’t care. You see, there are hardly any heroes in the college, hardly any people around whom the whole world revolves. Every student makes up the world called the University of Delhi. It is like this film set and we are all members of the supporting cast.

The school debating champion might make a face on hearing better intellectual arguments made by members of various Debating Societies. The conventional poet from secondary school might now explore more spoken word genres and different writing methods in the college literary circuit. School quizzes used to be to the point, with straight direct answers. However, in college the quizzes are more like puzzle solving questions with large paras of questions containing cryptic clues that need to be figured out to give the correct answer. Such changes apply in all fields of college life.

Therefore, it is up to us whether to continue fussing that we have lost our high school glory or whether to pick up the pieces and work on building a new glory all over again. Accepting change is a part and parcel of growing up and that is exactly what we do in a competitive artistic world like the University of Delhi. The quicker we face this reality, the better it gets. In the end, Andy Samberg’s lines from the 2016 film Popstar would best sum it up – “Sometimes, you’re up. Sometimes, you’re down. But the trick is not to lose yourself along the way.”

Feature Image Credits- FanPOP

Shaurya Singh Thapa 

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