About Me 👋

Hello folks, I'm Lubna Fathima, a final year IT undergraduate from a 3rd tire university in India. I thought that this article would be the perfect place to share my experience.

From NEET aspirant who knows nothing in tech, to becoming a web developer, freelancer, an open source contributor, and being a part of amazing tech communities.

First, let me tell you how I joined my university before I talk about my university experience.

NEET Preparation 👩‍⚕️

To those of you who don't know what the NEET examination is:

NEET or the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test is a medical entrance test for aspirants seeking admittance into medical institutions

In preparation for the NEET examination, I worked hard. long story short, I passed the entrance examination with decent marks but it wasn't enough to get admitted to a Government medical college.

By this time it was the end of July which means all the arts stream colleges already started their next academic year.

As a fresher at the University 🧐

As a last resort, I enrolled in a third tire engineering college.

The situation can be particularly relevant to Indian students who did not get into IITs and medical colleges

I would have been depressed if it wasn't for the amazing people I met along the way.

Smart India Hackathon 2020 👩‍💻

The First 3-4 months passed just like that

Attending boring lectures and just copy-paste the codes in my python programming classes.

That's when I came across Smart India Hackathon.

Smart India Hackathon is a nationwide initiative to provide students with a platform to solve some of the pressing problems we face in our daily lives.

With the help of my motivating mentors under the guidance of our principal, my team and I participated in SIH 2020. We gave our proposal and were waiting for the results.

Quarantine Period 😷

It was during quarantine, which was capable to make or break us.

Many of us lost our loved ones and were in a depressed state. At that time announcement of SIH finals came and it was conducted virtually.

SIH Finals (virtual) 🤳

Due to quarantine we struggled a lot, as we didn't had any direct contact with our college or the organizers of SIH.

It was a three-day event. As a team of freshers and students with different backgrounds, we pulled the all-nighter and did our best to provide a solution.

(If you guys are interested to know all about SIH, such as what happened on those 3 days and how we almost presented the wrong solution 😅 Yes you heard it right. I can make a separate blog on it!)

We didn't win the competition, but the experience I gained from it was >>>

That's what sparked my interest in web development

Due to online classes, I used to feel so disconnected from college. but after SIH my team and I got so much recognition and Our faculties came forward and congratulated us.

I didn't want to stop just there so I started to search more about Tech and tech-related stuff.

100 days of code 💯

How can I not talk about this? If you know me from Twitter then you can see that my profile is all about the #100daysofcode challenge.

One day I was surfing Twitter (you know, to see some Bollywood movie gossip 😂) and came across this tech challenge called #100daysofcode.

After stalking the people, who used to post about it. I decided to take up the challenge. When I was around 5-10days, My university made the announcement of the next semester's exam.

After stressing about it for a week, I gave up on the #100daysofcode challenge and started preparing for my examination but guess whatttttt

Exams got canceled!!!! Woah even now, while writing this, the amount of happiness I feel is >>>>>

Then I started with the challenge again, do check out

Along with my online class I used to watch Jonas Schmedtmann's Javascript tutorial. I also learned frameworks like SASS, bootstrap, JQuery, and so on. Followed some amazing youtube videos for guidance.

In short, you can say that I'm an advocate of #100daysofchallenge and totally recommend it to all newbies who wanna start with programming.

• You can keep a track of what you learn
• You meet amazing like-minded people
• Get confidence in your work
• Most important Let's you be consistent in your work

Post second wave of covid 📚

Ah, Eventually, everything returned to normal and my college was able to function again. By now I was in my second year of college. I was so excited to meet my friends and even though I used to chat with them on call. Meeting them in person was a whole next level.

Internships & Frontend Mentor Challenge 🏢

Only after coming back to college, did I feel the whole competitiveness. I had to do something to level up. I did my internship in the college and gave Gyan(Share knowledge) to people around me about tech and the tech community on Twitter.

Twitter was now one of my strongest platforms and also started to participate in Frontend Mentor challenges.

I also conducted a web development workshop at my college, The event was attended by high school graduates interested in pursuing engineering careers. It was a whole new experience.

Events ⚽️

A student's college experience would be incomplete without occasional events like sports, cultural events, etc.

My favorite sport is throwball and lucky enough to gain friends who have similar interests. Just me and my friends were enough to fill a whole team. Although we secured second position, the day was unforgettable.

My college's cultural event was a big event, the first of its kind in the history of my college. An evening of dancing, DJ music, and disco lights took place under the night sky. My friends also participated and I had the honor of MCing the inauguration ceremony.

MERN Stack, Open source, Data structures:

Eventually, I started my 3rd year of college, thanks to online exams. The one thing I kept doing was, maintaining consistency in my learning and building projects. I was a decent web developer and did some side hustle and freelancing from Internshala (I know most people will recommend Upwork or Fiver, but It is what it is 🤓)

So next I level up and started learning the MERN stack

MERN stands for MongoDB, Express, React, Node. It is a JavaScript Stack that is used for easier and faster deployment of full-stack web applications.

Here is something I regret not doing earlier:

• Contributing to Open source Often people think that we should gain more knowledge/experience before contributing to open source but if you have a decent amount of knowledge that's enough to contribute. -Learning Data Structure `From a fresher to until you graduate you should focus on learning DSA. Once you learn it in 3-4months practice at least 1 leetcode problem per day

Plans for final year🎓

Just thinking about this makes me overwhelmed. It feels like time has passed away quickly.

The only agenda I have is to continue my learning, open source contribution, data structures, and learning fundamentals for my interview.

Outro

While getting into tech was not my goal, I have no regrets about what destiny has given me.

Now every time I look back the only thing I feel is

Clearly, this is where I'm supposed to be

In search of achieving our goal, we always forget to embrace the journey. It's the way my life is and I wouldn't change it for anything.

Thanks for reading so far. This is my first blog, so I look forward to your constructive criticism. See ya again... 👋