Schooling Your Way

When you are in school especially in 9th — 12th grade then this feeling hits you that in a few years you will be out of school and you ask yourself “What Next?”. Because you have only lived a small portion of your life and you still have to do something for the rest of your life. So the decisions you make in school are kind of important. I am not saying you have to decide everything, you can change your career at any point of time but the difficulty to change your path increases exponentially with time. So it is better to have a good sight as early as possible. But there’s also a catch here, the things in which I am interested today , I might not be interested in that after 5 years. And this is totally possible. In fact your interests can change in one month. But you have to be in a better position than you were 5 years ago. And one thing I want to stress is that there are interests which might not be good career wise but you like doing it. So I would suggest you keep doing that whenever possible because you never know you might get an opportunity in the future in that field. So enough of this generalisation, I will tell you about my experience.

So in my school days I was pretty much concerned about the things I was learning there. And science was my goto. I had much more interest in Science (Physics and Maths) than anything. This may sound generic but it’s true :p. But Maths and Physics in itself is so vast that even the greatest scientists are not able to complete the syllabus. So I narrowed it down to Astronomy and Astrophysics. This was class 9 , I had watched all the episodes of COSMOS and Into the universe with Stephen Hawking. I was so interested that I had read “A brief history of time” in class 9 only and what came to my surprise was that I was understanding the majority of the concepts. I was very fascinated with Special Theory of Relativity. So I decided to go one step further. I researched and decided to buy HC Verma book in which I knew there was a chapter related to relativity in the last, I knew it was not in the curriculum of JEE or CBSE , but I still read that and solved it’s questions. So in class 9th I read about various concepts of Astronomy from Library books and sometimes from my father’s 2g phone. But as I came to class 10th I slowly got engaged with my “actual” curriculum and coaching preparation for my JEE and slowly the interest for astronomy faded away. I needed a new interest. I have also an interest in Maths and I liked solving those number theory and probability problems. So solving was one of my interests and I like mathematical puzzles. I like it so much that even today I take some time to solve and learn new concepts of maths. So these were my interests in school. And a few more had come in my life when I was in college. We’ll talk about it in “Colleging your way ;p”.

I know taking decisions in school can be hard. And not everybody’s interests align with the curriculum. But you should definitely take some time for your interests. By this you are refining your skill in that and maybe in future you get the opportunity to do something about that so you have to be prepared. You never know how your life turns, so make sure you hold that steering tightly.