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– Asfaq Jalal I got to know about the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) in Class 11 when my tuition teachers in Oman told me that there is an exam that admits students to prestigious colleges in India. My father is a professor in Oman and I along with my younger brother and mother had moved with my father from India to Oman in 2015 when I was in Class 7. I appeared for Class 10 and Class 12 exams under the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) in Oman. I started my JEE preparation from Class 12 in Oman itself. After securing a seat in IIT Madras, I am now in my fourth year doing BTech in Mechanical Engineering. JEE Preparation It was a big advantage for me being in Oman instead of India, because I hardly had any peer pressure, nor any competition to look at. I only had to concentrate on my scores and not look at anyone else, because at that time, JEE started booming over there. Although I was going through study materials for JEE Main during my board exams, my end goal was to join a government college in Tamil Nadu back in India which took students based on their Class 12 marks. I appeared for JEE in 2021. I scored around 99 percentile in my first attempt at JEE Main and 99.8 percentile in the second session of JEE Main. When the result was declared, I was in Oman. My relatives from India called me to congratulate me and one of them also informed me that there is an exam called the JEE Advanced which admits candidates to the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). Only after this, I started looking for study materials for JEE Advanced, filled the exam form, and started preparing for the exam. I got myself enrolled in online classes and also got some merit scholarships based on my JEE Main scores. The Covid-induced delays also were in favour for me. Since I had only started my preparation right after my board exams were over and JEE Main was done with, I was not bogged down by the delays in the exam schedule. I appeared for JEE Advanced and obtained a rank of 1518. In addition to mechanical engineering at IIT Madras, I also applied for the electrical engineering branch. The food and other stuff didn’t bother me much, although they are not so good. But since I am a South Indian, the food was somewhat similar to my home. I am not that type of an NRI who used to speak English with an accent. We lived a very normal life in Oman just like how we used to live in India. So, from the lifestyle point of view, there were no major changes or issues for me. In the first year, I did not do anything much in the club system. But from the beginning of the second year, I got myself enrolled into so many things. I got into the robotic club. I was a coordinator which is basically handling the management side of it. I was a project member in one of the agricultural robotic projects, and eventually that agricultural project also turned out to be a startup. And secondly, one of the best things I got into is the entrepreneurship cell. With these clubs, I learnt a lot of new things, made many new friends and built a great network. I also got enrolled in a professor project. We also organised our first ever online Entrepreneurship Summit, after working online for around two years, and that was also a very good experience for us. Somewhere around the end of my second year, unfortunately, one of my closest friends in the campus died by suicide. It affected me and my friends a lot. We started analysing what went wrong in his life, questioned our role in his life, and felt we have failed as friends. We started introspecting our lives and began to see the solutions in the little things bothering us instead of just letting them grow. Since arriving at IIT, my confidence has significantly grown. Opportunities at IITs come towards you instead of you chasing for opportunities. The exposure I have gained here is invaluable. I also interned as a Product Inventor at Invention Factory, hosted by the Maker Bhavan Foundation (MBF) at IIT Bombay for six week. This six-week innovation programme by the MBF was aimed at empowering students to innovate, develop prototypes and secure patents with the guidance of professors, industry experts, and patent attorneys. That was my first encounter with people from other colleges. So, there I gathered a lot of knowledge in terms of various cultures. Being in an IIT has brought in a major transformation in my life because we get to meet and interact and collaborate with the top individuals of the nation and sometimes even the world. This type of opportunity helps us think and manage things from a bigger picture or a macro level while catering to all the micro aspects of anything. I joined as a co-founder of QPo Cabs. It is a startup built to provide daily commuters with comfortable yet affordable rides using shared mobility. Currently, QPo helps their customers to track share autos in real-time, broadcast location to drivers for easy pickups, and get dropped off at their desired location. We had started this full-fledged somewhere around January 2024, and since then, we have been working hard to build the next mobility giant in India. Mridusmita Deka covers education and has worked with the Careers360 previously. She is an alumnus of Gauhati University and Dibrugarh University. ... Read More None
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