02–12th Grade: turns out I do like science
At this point, I’m doing this just to maintain chronology in these things. 12th grade went fine for me, and it’s hard to write about things that went fine.
April 2022: Following a disastrous year-end test at, well, the end of 11th grade, we got a two-week break. I planned to use the time to beat myself into shape for the next year. I knew I couldn’t afford to lose it. My plan was to spend the first couple of days relaxing and then study consistently for the next week. The last three days of the break I had to spend in my hometown for a wedding. In any case, I’d get a good 7 days for studying.
Obviously, procrastination got the better of me. I’d wake up late, spend time on my phone for a couple of hours, realize I had to study, and then find myself in no mood to do it. The first “couple” of days eventually came to be the first eight days of the break. I had intended to catch up on all the topics I’d missed out on in 11th, in addition to the assignments we were given for the break. I ended up barely finishing the assignments.
And there went my break. Fourteen days. I tried to start 12th grade on an optimistic note but ultimately got bogged down by the guilt of having wasted my whole break. Electrodynamics, the topic in Physics we started with, turned out to be equivalent to Mechanics in 11th (in the sense that I couldn’t make any sense of it). Backlog began piling up on an already existing pile of chapters from the last year.
In the middle of all this, KVPY happened towards the end of May (for those unfamiliar, KVPY was a science scholarship exam conducted by IISc. It doesn’t happen anymore. Breaks my heart). At this point, it had already been delayed twice, thanks to COVID and other reasons. For someone who had prioritized KVPY over other exams, I sure was spectacularly unprepared for it. The exam was supposed to happen in November 2021 and I was actually putting in effort (relatively) for it, but then it got delayed and I lost enthusiasm.
Now KVPY was an exam that comprised four subjects — Physics, Chem, Math, and Biology. The first three I was trained to deal with in my coaching. Bio was something I had to manage on the side. A couple of weeks prior to the exam, I sat down and tried to go through the important topics, and in doing so, it dawned upon me that I actually liked Biology. I remember particularly well, watching a video on something called alternate splicing around this time, and thinking it was the coolest thing ever.
The exam went just as you would expect, but I came out of it knowing that I liked Biology more than any other subject. So here I was, an engineering “aspirant” who only really liked the one subject that he didn’t have to study.
At this point, I don’t know what exactly it was that caused it, but science became interesting. Just about every chapter that was taught after that, I was engrossed in, no matter what subject. Perhaps it isn’t the greatest word to describe my emotions, but science became “cool”. Equations that would’ve been painstaking to look just a year back, were now elegant. Graphs began to make so much more sense. It suddenly seemed worthwhile to read up on the history behind a famous theorem, to ask “why?” to every unexplained statement in NCERT, to fall into rabbit holes while looking up topics— I once ended up on a Wikipedia page on Nazi-Era Eugenics while researching for a math project about statistics.
12th grade became enjoyable owing to nothing but the fact that I finally had an end goal. I was going to get into research. Not engineering, research. IISER became more obvious an option now. I didn’t have to change much about what I was preparing and how. I’d have to write one more exam — the IISER Aptitude Test, but that was it. JEE still remained as a backup option.
Life was good after this (for a finite amount of time). I liked what I was doing. I’d given in to the idea of being a nerd. There were so many instances where I had a newfound appreciation for the things humanity has done in the (relatively) short time it’s been around. It’s a stretch, maybe, but if you’re into science, you can’t help but be amazed at some of these things.
At some point, I had my less-than-ideal 18th birthday. My parents tested positive for COVID that evening, and a health checkup at school told me that I was basically blind for distances more than a few feet and I’d have to get glasses ASAP(Can’t blame me, I sat in the first row every day. Why and how would I have noticed that I couldn’t see things?). I had to stay in another apartment for a while after that. I was aware of the fact that turning 18 meant that I’d have to move out, I just didn’t think it would be this instant. While it wasn’t the same as living in a hostel, it did give me a taste of living alone.
Around October last year, we had to start working on our investigatory projects (CBSE reference). These accounted for a mere 5 marks out of the total 100, and you didn’t usually have to put much effort into securing all of them. You could be minimal and do any of the 12 age-old experiments given in the age-old manual, or you could go all-out on it. Obviously, I went with the latter. I made it a point to not do anything standard. The 5 marks were not even close to being worth the time and effort I put into them (an in-detail project on Biochemical Oxygen Demand does not warrant mind-boggling questions like “What is the full form of BOD?” from the examiner), but boy did I enjoy every last minute I spent in the lab working them out.
It’s not that I was particularly good at handling lab apparatus or getting precise values, but I was sure that I liked spending hours in a lab in a coat, trying to make things work out. Often the analysis was more interesting than the experiment itself (a trend that has continued in college).
As 2022 approached its end, a little something called JEE Mains (First Attempt) drew closer and the fun slowly died down. My coaching had started its revision phase by November. Sure it was intensive, sure I got some minor PTSD while we went through the 11th grade chapters once again, but I managed to keep my calm. Mock tests kept happening every couple of days. I had to face disappointment in a bunch of them. It wasn’t unusual at this time to end a test and question whether I was going to make it.
15th December 2022, everyone’s favorite examination authority, the National Testing Agency (I could write a whole lovingly-worded post about how efficient they are) announced the dates for Mains and things got real.
And I think that’s where I’ll end 12th grade. Everything that came after was just the ‘prelude’ to JEE and all the other exams I wrote. In the six months that followed ( characterized by terms like ‘rank’ and ‘cutoff’) I experienced a myriad of highs and lows and had to navigate myself out a crisis completely separate from anything I had going on. It’ll be a whole post of it’s own.
Unlike the last post, I don’t have any lessons learned or advice to give. Like I said, I had to maintain continuity. If you’ve read till here, you’re most likely someone who went through the same things or you’re going to, very soon.
