In my first year at IIT Roorkee, I wanted to belong somewhere.
Every new student feels this. You arrive at college and the world suddenly seems full of interesting people doing interesting things. There are clubs for music, drama, literature, debate, photography. You go to the trials, you put your name forward, and you wait to find out which version of yourself college is going to let you become.
I tried several. The Music club. Dramatics. The campus magazine, Watch Out. One by one, they said no.
I did get selected in the Light section — the group that managed stage lighting for events. I joined, attended a few sessions, and decided it was not what I was looking for. So I left that too.
By the end of my first year, I had been rejected by or had walked away from every student group I had tried. It was a quiet kind of failure — not dramatic, not catastrophic, just a series of doors that did not open.
The Redirect
I made a decision that I did not think much of at the time. I would stop trying to find a group to join and start learning computing as seriously as I could.
I had always been drawn to it. I spent long evenings in the computer lab. I read whatever I could find. I wrote programs, broke them, fixed them, wrote more. I had no particular goal other than getting better — not better than someone else, just better than I had been the week before.
By the time third year arrived, something had happened that I had not planned for. I had become genuinely capable.
Building IMG
A couple of seniors and classmates were thinking about the same problem I was thinking about: the institute’s website and online systems were in poor shape. The information students needed was scattered or absent. There was no good way to search for people, manage library resources, or handle placements online.
We started building.
The Notice Board. A People Search. A library management system. Recruitment management for placements. Each one was a real piece of software solving a real problem for real people on campus.
We formed a group to do this properly. We called it IMG — Information Management Group.
It was not glamorous. We were not doing anything that would have impressed the students who ran the music club or the drama society. We were fixing unglamorous things: how do you find a professor’s contact details, how do you know when a book is available, how does a company post a recruitment notice.
But the work was ours. And it was needed.
What Happened Next
IMG became the most sought-after group on campus.
I find this genuinely funny to think about now. The clubs that had no room for me in my first year remained what they always were — good clubs, doing good work, meaningful to the people in them. But the group we built from scratch, out of necessity and stubbornness, grew into something that outlasted all of us.
IMG is still running today, more than twenty years later. It is still considered the most competitive and prestigious student group at IIT Roorkee. The alumni who came through it have gone on to build companies, lead engineering teams, and do work that has reached millions of people.
None of that was planned. We were just trying to make the campus work better.
The Thing About Rejection
I want to be careful here, because I am not going to tell you that rejection is always a gift or that every closed door leads to a better one. That is not always true and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.
But I do think there is something specific that happened to me that is worth naming.
When every existing group said no, I had no ready-made identity to slot into. I could not become “the magazine person” or “the theatre person.” I had to figure out what I actually wanted to spend my time on — not what label I wanted, but what work I wanted to do.
And the work I chose was building things.
That choice, made mostly by default in the quiet aftermath of a series of rejections, turned out to be the most important choice of my college years. Everything that came after — the companies, the products, the teams — grew from the habit of mind I developed during those hours in the computer lab when no club wanted me.
The doors that stayed closed pushed me toward the one I did not know I was looking for.
If you are a student reading this and you have just been rejected from something you wanted: I am not going to promise it works out. But I will say — the question worth asking is not “why didn’t they want me?” It is “what do I actually want to spend the next three years getting good at?”