Nearly all parents and children of 12th grade have multiple times faced the inevitable question”Aur beta Kyaa karnaa chahte ho aage?”Now those who have Medical, Engineering, Law
etc in mind, its a straightforward answer. Now for the others its a most dreaded reality to be faced. The answer may vary from “pataa naheen” to an evasive “exploring various options”. We fall under the second category, which i believe has its advantages on the one hand – it gives you many options to choose from and at the same time the disadvantage -many options to choose from.
With the board exams looming large over our heads, we heard of a couple of parents sharing proudly that their ward had already secured admission in college. Some shared how they had hired counselors (paying hefty fee) to help build the child’s profile. Now this rang alarm bells for us and triggered my hunt for good colleges.
Next up was the biggest challange at hand. The “Big Question” – the unanswered question “Karnaa kyaa hai?” We started by listing out various courses based on rudimentary search on career options. Next was diving a bit deeper to understand the course content and as if that was not enough its, relevance to the industry requirements. I was starting to feel like the chairperson of “Niti Aayog”. Now we turned to Google for a little support to find and sign up for a website to help us in our College search, “College dhoondo dot com type”. These searches threw up list of Institutions which incidentally are different on different “dhoondo.com” sites.
All Institutions splashed their NIRF ranking, NAAC accreditation across the website, but the largest space was given to a star who had grabbed an enviable starting salary which i admit was just a bit less than what earned after a few years of toil. Now the important step of applying for admission, which was soon followed up hounding phone calls from counselors asking to book slots for entrance exams and interview slot with promises of scholarships and early bird discounts. All this happened in the matter of a month, timing being strangely amusing as the board exams were also not over yet. The hypocrisy of this whole madness dawned on me as the efforts from all the high and mighty “private universities” were only directed towards filling up the seats as fast as possible.In all of this pandemonium we have navigated our way through board exams, various entrance exams, interviews and more of waiting for the latter in the coming days. Its a feeling of being a trapeze artist swinging from one beam to the next and from one end to another.
