The Transition.

             The transition from class 10th to intermediate is a huge leap regardless of your choice of subjects. Within a month any student would realize that class 10 had been a cake walk and soon they would know that their cake has been overheated, burnt and dead. Especially for the science students.

    This is not because Science is 'tougher' than humanities or commerce or any other subject but because 80% of the students take up science.  In India, taking up Science is an 'intelligence' statement. A good, hard working student must take science. Arts and humanities are for losers who could not get a good score in their 10th boards. Although, this perception is gradually changing but the change is slow. Wake up people! Economics, Commerce, Psychology, Geography, History, Political Science require as much brain power, intelligence and aptitude as for science. Chanakya, the royal adviser of Chandragupta Maurya is considered the world's first, and one of India's greatest economics.Barack Obama, was a law student at Harvard. Students in India must assess their own interests and aptitude before blindly taking up science just because people in the past have been doing it or because it is suppose to be the 'in' thing.

       Moreover, out of the science student majority get into preparation for medical stream or IIT JEE-engineering. These avenues and options are not bad at all. However, their drawback is that they are over-clique-d  and almost every second kid in India is trying their hands at it. What are we going to do of SO many doctors and engineers?

    Since I had taken up PCM and like the herds of sheep going for engineering, I did some research. I don't know about the medical stream but I can vouch for my stream.

      I know the newspaper give of gala accounts of students who get picked up by multinational companies getting packages in lakhs but that is not the true picture at all. Lets just forget these lucky ones. True, if you work hard enough you can be there, but not everyone gets there. If we deselect a few toppers- a lot of students with excellent degrees form the best colleges remain unemployed and practically struggle for jobs.

Why? Because there is an excess of engineers!

             After a lot of analysis I got to the conclusion that people opt for engineering for these reasons:

• Clearing the JEE is a matter of pride and honor for many students. It is not about doing engineering it is about giving the prestigious exam. 
• It is stable and explored option. No experiments involved.
• Their parents or siblings did it too. Their peers are doing it.
• Genuine interest in the field.
  Why do you think BIG coaching center's have started classes to prepare for JEE from grade 6? I wonder which kid in grade 6 would want to be an engineer? Do they even know what an engineer does? I doubt it. It's just something fed into their brains by their parents.

I remember when I was in 6th grade I wanted to be an astronaut, then an artist for sometime.

            Anyway, my point of telling you all this is because kids do not realize this fact during the "transition". It is later on that the pointlessness comes to light. 

         This is specially because majority of the students get flying colors in their 10th boards which gives them a confidence that they can do 11th and 12th too. But WARNING: that is a delusion because 11th and 12th is NOTHING like class 10.

           The first few months of 11th are spent by students in two ways. Some think of it as a post-board break and party away two-three months. Others, the more geeky ones, start off with their preparations for competitive exams withing a week.

           I fall under the first category. After boards were over in March, school reopened in April. We had a pleasant one month break. The thing about the break-when you have nothing to do is-you get bored. I yearned for the boards to be over, however, once they were over days began to feel empty. That is when I started to think about my career options. I had opted for PCM, and wanted to pursue engineering. My father

almost had me admitted into another school with an integrated coaching program. I wish I had listened to him because life would have been much easier then. However, I did not want to leave my friends or my school. So I looked into classroom programs which are conducted in the evening. My parents and I went to different coaching centers Aakash, FIITJEE, Trivag and a couple of other local coaching institutes. I asked my seniors and other students on their feedback and finally settled for on one institute. (I wont name it, so lets just call it 'CCG' (which is short for coaching) otherwise they might sue me for slander.)

                I had done all this by April, and I could join the coaching right then. But I did not want to. It was too soon to get into studies, so I decided to join a late batch-one that began in June. I did this specifically because my parents had promised me that we would go for a trip overseas during the summer vacations, and I did not want to miss any CCG days or have backlog. 

            My personal advice to anyone who is in such a situation is to take a proper break of about a month or so before entering into any coaching because one you do that any form of break over the next two years will only be a dream. So take a well deserved break, but not a break as long as mine. This choice of mine had heavy repercussions, which I will explain gradually.

      You must be thinking that I have been condemning the practice of taking up PCM for no good reasons when I had myself taken PCM. What a phony right? I will tell you my reasons for taking up PCM soon.