Three years ago, I stepped into robotics with curiosity, energy, and very little idea of how wide the field really was.

Today, as I stand at the edge of my final year, I can say this much with complete certainty: robotics has been the most demanding, confusing, exciting, and rewarding thing I have ever committed myself to.

Over these last three years, I have worked across frontier robotics, biomanipulation, reinforcement learning, FPGAs, and GPUs. On paper, these sound like very different domains. And they are. But that is exactly what made the journey so transformative. Every project forced me to think differently. Every new domain made me uncomfortable in the best way possible. Every time I wandered into something unfamiliar, I came out sharper, humbler, and more capable.

There is a line people casually throw around: the more you fuck around, the more you find out.

In my case, that has been less of a joke and more of a design principle.

Because that is exactly how these three years have unfolded. I explored. I experimented. I took up things I did not fully understand. I made mistakes. I switched contexts. I learned by building, breaking, debugging, reading, retrying, and sometimes just staying with a problem long enough for it to finally make sense. And somewhere in all that chaos, I found direction.

A huge part of this journey has been @SRAVJTI.

It is difficult to describe what a place like that gives you unless you have lived inside it. A club can look like an organization from the outside, but from within, it becomes much more than that. It becomes your training ground, your pressure cooker, your support system, your standard of excellence, and your memory bank all at once.

SRA has served me incredibly well, and I would like to believe I have served it well too. What it has given me is not temporary. It is not something that ends with a term or a title or a batch transition. It is a kind of inheritance, a kind of culture, a kind of technical and personal shaping that I will carry with me for a very long time. Maybe forever.

And that is what makes this moment feel heavy.

I am now in my third year, close to its end. Just one year of college remains. Which also means my time in this club, in this phase of life, is nearing its natural close. That realization brings with it a strange mix of emotions. There is gratitude. There is nostalgia. There is pride. There is also excitement for what lies ahead.

I do not think I am leaving these three years behind. I think I am carrying them forward.

Every late night spent figuring out why something would not run. Every time a model behaved unexpectedly. Every hardware bottleneck. Every moment of discovery. Every team discussion. Every failed attempt that later became a breakthrough. These are not isolated memories anymore. Together, they have become a way of thinking.

And maybe that is what these three years were really about.

  • Not just learning robotics, but learning how to learn.
  • Not just building projects, but building taste.
  • Not just joining a club, but becoming part of a legacy.
  • Not just preparing for a career, but becoming someone capable of walking into the unknown and figuring things out.

Because before the projects, there was the journey.

Before the milestones, there was the becoming.

And these three years have meant a lot.