Offline Exams in Hostel days.

I spent 4 years living away in a hostel for my bachelors’ degree. I got this admission after a lot of struggles, and I didn’t want to waste this opportunity, so I started studying every waking second, I got. From the lazy careless kid, I had transformed into this scholar who eats drinks and sleeps his studies. I took the classes way too seriously, in my mind, I thought bachelor would definitely be tougher than JEE OR NEET, hence I can’t waste another moment. Full hustle mode. Only after my roommates showed me how to actually live like a hostelite, I calmed down and started to enjoy this new life. Somehow by the last moment, everything gets sorted out in a hostel. You get a senior’s notes, a friend teaches you or you stay up late to mug up the stuff and end up teasing and giggling throughout, but Something always gets done.

We’d always sit in groups to study, wanting to meet at 9 we all gathered by 11.30. Of course, we had our reasons like washing clothes, cleaning the room, or late-night sessions of… you know what. We’d study for half an hour and crave lunch. So, we leave it all and go to eat. After lunch, we sit again, but the sugar spike got us all lazy, now we want a nap. Suddenly the 15 min nap becomes 2 hours and now it's 4 pm. Shocked we wake up and realize now it's tea time! So, after all the drama and wasting half the day we understand we can’t study on our own, so we packed up and went to the library, to waste other peoples’ time.

One noteworthy part was my best friend, he didn’t live with me, but before every exam, we’d spend the entire days together, each morning he would come after getting ready, he always had a plan, he’d always have had a talk with a senior who could come and clear our last-minute doubts, which essentially meant teaching us from the scratch. We would go to other classmates’ places (we all lived nearby) and collect notes, scan the question papers, discuss concepts with other bright students, divide the syllabus and teach each other the heck out of it. We’d kill it by the end of the day and we didn’t even realize it. Cracking college exams was so much simpler than cracking the ones real life throws at us.

Exams were a gala. By the final years, we’d get excited for the exams because we knew writing the papers was just a small part of it. Often, we’d sit together in the library and talk about all the stuff we’d do after the exams, Ah! So many plans left unfulfilled… the discussions would start from the studies and before we realized we were discussing love lives of our classmates, the joy of gossip! Like this, the day would end and by that time we had collected enough data to ace the exams.

Not to mention the pre-exam preparation, when we all collected in different parts of college and explained concepts to each other, predicted questions which will surely appear in the test and dividing them as who’ll write which ones and show the other. It was fun. After a few semesters we had an idea of writing and presenting the answers. We had it all figured out.