Time is a Bird

       Time is a bird, it flies away. It waits for no one, especially for engineering students. Of-course, everyone is lazy in someway or the other and they seem to miss out on doing things on time. But for engineering students, it becomes a habit which is very difficult to change.

       Before joining college, in school, most of us are punctual in doing things, like getting ready for school, completing assignments beforehand, etc. But that happens only because our parents are there to watch over us. They make sure that we are doing things on time. But the moment we step into college, we are free to do things the way we like, at the time we like. If the classes are at 10 am, then no one gets up before 9:30 am. Several wake up 9:50 am, and getting ready for classes in 10 minutes is a feat that they master quickly.

      There is a tradition at every engineering college when it comes to assignments. No one does anything right before the day of submission. Only a couple of students in a class, at most, complete the assignment. The night before submission day, these people become celebrities, as everyone visits their rooms for their notes. Their completed work is religiously passed around till morning, by when everyone completes the assignment. And at the class, everyone promptly submits. The teacher knows what has happened most of the time, because a mistake in one notebook will be found in all other notebooks in exactly the same place. This thing also happens when it comes to our exams. All Indian colleges follow the semester pattern, with the exception of a few South Indian colleges, where exams are held annually. Now the semester pattern has a few advantages and disadvantages. One advantage is that exams are held only twice a year. That means most of us don't study till a couple of weeks before exam. And when we are not able to study everything in that short time, we say that there wasn't enough time for preparation. What we don't realize is that we all have ample time, but we mostly waste it.

     There is another thing that every engineering student will agree to. And that is that time flies very fast between semesters and we don't realize that our four years at the college is over. When we come in as freshers we think we have four whole years to spend here before we can get out. But those four years just slip by. We get so immersed in college life that we don't see what's happening, and before long we are packing our bags to leave, wishing we had used our time here better.