Trust The Process
By: Dhruv Upadhyay
Tags: Education, Basketball, Life, College, Motivation

A lot of you may already know that I’m from the small town of Crossville, Tennessee. Throwing it back to July 2008, my family moved to Crossville from Toronto, Canada 🇨🇦. Back then, this was probably the worst day of my 11-year-old life. I hated the idea of leaving my childhood friends behind and moving from a city like Toronto to some middle-of-nowhere town in Tennessee where I imagined everyone was like the hillbillies from The Simpsons.

Looking back at it now, my experience in Crossville wasn’t nearly as bad as I had imagined it would be over 10 years ago. I mean, before I got there, I imagined people rode in horse-drawn carriages instead of cars and most households lacked basic things like television. So naaah, it wasn’t close to being that bad. I actually don’t regret moving to Crossville because otherwise, I wouldn’t have gotten to make the friends and memories I was able to during my 6 years there.

“Imagine if I never met the broskies” — Drake (Credit: @nathaniel1633 IG)

I most likely wouldn’t have gone to Purdue for college either if I still lived in Toronto, and I would have missed out on all the opportunities that I’ve experienced there so far. Maybe moving from Toronto to Tennessee was just a part of The Process, and maybe it was for the better 🤷🏽‍♂️.

Speaking of Purdue, most people might not know this, but it was my safety school (albeit it’s one of the best Computer Science schools and a top 10 public school in the country) back when I was applying to colleges during my senior year of high school. Other schools I wanted to get into were the likes of Stanford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon and like 5 Ivy League colleges 😬.

Even after working really hard in my final 2 years of high school as well as during college application season and getting my test scores up, it didn’t work out with those other schools, and I had to settle for Purdue. I was reeeally upset about that back then for a while 😤. As my senior year of high school went on, I tried to get over this by trying to get more excited about Purdue, learning more about the school, and engaging with my future classmates on some Facebook groups. Even then, a part of me still wished that I had gotten into one of my top choices.

About 4 years later, I can say that I definitely don’t feel the way I once did. Going to Purdue has been an awesome experience. I’ve worked with the smartest people I’ve ever met, been constantly challenged in my coursework, and have gotten the same opportunities I would have had at any of those other schools I applied to, if not more.

Trust. The. Process.

Credit: tenor.com

Maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t get into my top college choices back then; all it did was motivate me even more to make the most of my opportunities at Purdue and to work even harder to overcome the challenges I came across. Speaking of which, I thought Purdue would be a cakewalk (LOL); after all, it was my safety. I went into my freshman year with this mindset, and I won’t lie, Purdue kicked my ass 🤕. Coming into a major that I was pretty unfamiliar with paired with Purdue’s rigorous “weed-out” courses, it was pretty rough. I had never really struggled to get good grades back in high school, but now, here I was in my freshman year of college just trying to get C’s so I could pass my first few Computer Science classes 😪.

Live footage of Purdue vs my GPA freshman year

Tbh, I actually feel grateful for having gone through that first-year ass-whooping. After freshman year, I was really motivated to improve myself and get better; I knew that if I didn’t, there’s no way I’d last in this major going forward. I put in a ton of work outside of class and it definitely paid off as it’s been a lot smoother sailing since then and my GPA looks much happier 📈. I guess The Process just works in weird ways and sometimes it knocks you down a few times before letting you get back up.

Something else I really struggled with early on was getting an internship. I applied to like 500+ software engineering internship roles during my freshman year but got nothing (I don’t even remember if I even got an interview). No big deal. Most freshmen don’t even get internships after just 1 year, so whatever. I decided that I’ll just spend the summer improving my skills, learning new technologies, and try again next year.

Sophomore year comes by, and again I apply to hundreds of internship roles. Even though I’m so much better skill wise than I was 6 months ago, I still struggle to get interviews, and so my luck doesn’t seem to change…until about a week before finals week at the end of April. That’s when I learned that being patient is just part of The Process. You know how they say that “Good things come to those who wait”? Well, it turns out that’s actually true, at least it was for me. The week before finals week of Spring 2017, I received my first-ever internship offer from SmugMug, a company in the Bay Area. A few days later, I got another internship offer at a different company. At that moment, my 2 years of hard work seemed to have finally paid off as I had 2 offers come through in the clutch while not getting anything in the other 31 weeks of that school year.

After having done a successful internship at SmugMug, there was a snowball effect going into my junior year. My confidence was at an all-time high. I was getting more interviews in the first couple of months of my junior year than I had gotten the past 2 years combined. Damn, it felt good. Less than 3 months into the fall semester, I already had internship offers from 2 Fortune 500 companies (Microsoft and Salesforce); this was just wild. To go from contemplating dropping out of Computer Science to this in like 2 years? Damn. This was just crazy to me. That’s when I began to feel that The Process was legit, and things were really starting to work out.

After completing an internship this past summer at Microsoft, The Process didn’t stop and things seemed to continue to fall into place. I was really fortunate enough to get a lot of interviews this past Fall of 2018, including final rounds at companies I never imagined I’d even get a reply back from. I’ve also been really blessed to have been able to get a few offers already, one of which I’ve already accepted (details to come later 😁). Now, I just have this final stretch of college left to go before starting the next chapter of my life 🎓. It’s been a crazy journey up to this point, but I wouldn’t have wanted it to have gone any other way.