getting older, college, and dreams

getting older, college, and dreams 2026-05-24 · 8 min read some takes on engineering college, what i actually want, and how i feel about turning twenty What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore — and then run? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode? — Harlem, Langston Hughes i'm writing this, at the end of my second year of BSc computer science, having just walked out of my last exam. and i've been thinking a lot — about where i am, where i want to go, and whether the path i'm on is actually pointing in the right direction. there have been three things sitting heavy on my mind lately. time i'm turning twenty soon. and unlike most people who treat that as just another birthday, i've been sitting with it a little uncomfortably. not because i'm unhappy. but because twenty feels like the first age that means something. you're no longer a teenager. the things you build now aren't "cool kid working on an idea" — they're just work. real work. adult work. and i looked around recently and asked myself honestly — is what i'm doing right now pointing at something i actually care about? growing up i was always told i had potential. and for a long time that felt like enough — like a promise i could cash in later. but lately that word has started to feel hollow. potential is just a description of something that hasn't happened yet. it's not an achievement. it's a placeholder. i don't want to be someone people describe in future tense forever. the specific dream i keep coming back to is this: i want to build something. a startup, a product, something that solves a real problem for real people. and beyond that — i want to give back to the community i came from. AMU, Aligarh, the people around me who don't always have access to the same opportunities. that's the thing. that's what i actually want. and i'm twenty and i haven't started yet and i'm starting to feel the weight of that gap. college let me be honest about something first. AMU has been one of the best experiences of my life. fourth semester especially — i loved my classes, loved my teachers, made friendships i know are going to last. Sadia, Maariyah, Maria — these people make the whole thing worth it. but college also does this thing where it quietly convinces you that you're not ready yet. you meet people and everyone is preparing. studying to eventually start something. taking CS classes to eventually work in tech. collecting prerequisites for the life they want to live. and somewhere in all that preparing, the actual doing gets pushed to a perpetual later. i felt this in second year. the pull to just focus on exams, get the cgpa, do what was expected. the mimetics kick in hard — everyone around you is doing the same thing so it starts to feel like the only thing. focus on backlogs, apply for the right internships, clear the right papers. and none of that is wrong exactly. but if you're not careful, you look up and two years have gone by and you've been very busy doing everything except the thing you actually care about. the structure isn't bad. i'm not saying abandon it. i'm saying it's very easy to optimise for the structure instead of for the thing the structure is supposed to be pointing at. i built things this year — UnifyOS, Vercera 5.0, ICECI, hackathons. and all of that was real and i'm proud of it. but there's a difference between building inside the college container and building something that exists in the world on its own terms. i want more of the latter. dreams someone asked me recently what i actually want. not what i'm studying, not what projects i'm doing for credit — what do i actually want. and i said: i want to start something. a company, a product, something that matters to people outside this campus. i'm doing BSc computer science and i have two years left and i refuse to spend them only optimising for a grade. but the dream isn't just the startup. the part that keeps me up at night is the giving back piece. i grew up seeing people around me with so much potential and so few pathways. i want to be someone who builds those pathways. whether that's through what i build, through who i hire, through the community i create around whatever i end up doing — that's the point of all of it. the business is the vehicle. the community is the destination. i don't think too hard about whether this is realistic. the more you interrogate a dream for permission, the easier it is to talk yourself out of it. i find something worth doing and i go do it. that's the whole strategy. what i do think about is environment. the thing i've noticed this year is that my environment wasn't always set up to do the work i wanted to do. but there's a craft to designing your life such that the default action when you have free time is the thing you actually want to be building. i'm getting better at this. slowly. on planning — or the lack of it i'll be honest. i don't really plan. i never have. and i used to feel slightly guilty about that — like i was supposed to have a five year roadmap or a notion doc full of goals. but i've slowly made peace with the fact that that's just not how i work. and maybe it's not how life works either. i genuinely believe that even when you do plan, life has its own way of turning up. things happen that you didn't account for. people come in and change the direction. opportunities appear from nowhere. the plan bends or breaks and somehow you end up somewhere better or stranger or more interesting than what you had mapped out. so my approach — if you can call it that — is simpler. hope and work. care about the right things and then show up for them. trust that if you're moving in good faith toward something real, the path will reveal itself. i know that sounds naive. maybe it is. but looking back at everything that has actually mattered to me — the friendships, the projects, ICECI, the music i found, the ideas i keep returning to — none of it came from a plan. it came from paying attention and saying yes to the right things at the right time. that's what i'm taking into third year. not a roadmap. just intention and motion. the update second year is done. i'm about to turn twenty. third year starts soon and my heart is already a little heavy about it — two years left before i close this chapter at AMU. my goals going into third year: start building something real outside the classroom. be more intentional about who i'm building for and why. spend more time with the people who make all of it worth it. and somewhere in there — close the gap between potential and doing. AMU will always be part of me. aligarh will always be part of me. but i don't want to leave here having only been a student. i want to leave having started something. so let's see. ---- this was a longer one. feel free to reach out if any of this resonates — i'd genuinely love to hear where you're at too.