A timeline of giving up on your undergraduate degree

Sigh if this sounds familiar – a hyperactive, over-enthusiastic university junior knocks you with a query and along the conversation, you get an idea about his anticipations and premature aspirations regarding the bait he paid for.

Yet, as you look past your inner cyberbully, you recognise this gullible fresher as a shadow of your own past, full of expectations and ignorant of the foil-wrapped depression that awaits.

Your relationship with your university is much like Bangladeshis' relationship with road safety. You can't pinpoint exactly when you gave up on it, but now it's too late.

Here's looking back at your juvenile days as a university student.

Books, a relic of the past

Going to Nilkhet, and buying academic books thicker than your brain that made you buy all of them in the first place. Sounds familiar? If so, here's something else that should ring a bell as well – not even touching 70 percent of them by the semester's end.

The number of books bought being inversely proportional to the number of semesters is a basic thumb rule of higher studies. Around 3 AM before your semester finals, once you're done dealing with panic attacks, and halfway through your hunt for those precious slides your lecturer provided months back, you look at those sooty and grimy relics and loathe the person you've become.

Fall of the future faculty members

Sure, your seniors have laughed at you (and everyone else in your department) about your ambitions of being a faculty member. But being the certified Golden A+ boy you are, you're delusively confident about your capabilities based on the Bangladeshi education system. Hey, if English for Today didn't make you give up on English as a language, your university possible can't make you give up on your degree.

Thirty minutes into staring at the first semester lab quiz, you realise being a university lecturer is not your cup of tea. After the quiz ends, once you go to your section's group chat, you see people conveniently nailing problems you didn't dare attempt and yet have the audacity to whine about it. Maybe you really should've reconsidered that "buying you a rickshaw" threat by your father when you had the chance.

Notes, to take or not to take

The first thing a university student gets introduced to is the notes of previous batches. Nobody knows who took those notes in the first place or when they were taken. Yet, generations of engineers, doctors and corporate slaves stand on the shoulder of that one person and their legacy.

However, a fresher might not always comprehend the gravity of said notesand make the bold attempt of actually considering taking lecture notes. Mid-semester, with the date and course code written on top of a blank page and 30 minutes into the lecture, the fresher realises he's not the NCTB-sealed good student anymore. Yet, he doesn't care, knowing that the topper's probably going to take the notes for the entire class.

Only when the fresher gets a notification of his topper friend reacting to a meme he shared, does he realise that it's time to give up.

Remind Ifti to be quieter at [email protected]