Learn Something Just for the Fun of It
A reminder to stay curious
As another admission season nears its close, the air is thick with numbers, GATE scores, cutoffs, counselling schedules, seat matrices, and institute comparisons. Forums and Telegram groups are buzzing with activity. Aspirants are strategizing, and understandably so. Getting into a good postgraduate program, especially in India, can feel like threading a needle while running a marathon.
But amid all this planning and preparation, I’d like to offer a simple reminder that often gets lost in the noise:
Learn something just for the fun of it.
Not for the exam. Not for your LinkedIn profile. Not for some hypothetical interviewer. But purely because you’re curious. Because something about it excites you. Because it makes you lose track of time.
The Time I Dual-Booted Debian (Just Because)
Back in my second year of undergrad, I decided to dual-boot Debian on my Windows laptop. Not because any course required it. Not because I wanted to become a “Linux guy.” I just wanted to understand how it worked. I wanted to break through the abstraction and see the operating system from the inside. It was a clunky, gaming-heavy laptop that I hauled to college every time we had a lab session. I could have simply used the lab systems like everyone else, but I wanted the satisfaction of running things on my own setup. I craved the control, the flexibility, and most importantly, the understanding. I became obsessed with bash scripting. I fell down the rabbit hole of dotfiles and terminal customizations. I picked up Neovim as my text editor and even wrote a couple of plugins, nothing groundbreaking, just small utilities that made my setup uniquely mine. At the time, I wasn’t thinking about interviews, research statements, or building an impressive portfolio. But those very experiences, born from pure curiosity, ended up becoming the deciding factor in my System Administrator interview at IIT Bombay.
A Summer of Aptitude and a Friendly Wager
There’s another story I cherish from those college days. One summer, a friend and I made a casual bet: we’d attempt to solve the entire UPSC Quantitative Aptitude book, cover to cover. It wasn’t preparation for any exam either of us planned to write. It wasn’t for internship or placement prep. It was simply a challenge, a way to test ourselves, spend time productively, and maybe sharpen our problem-solving skills along the way. Today, that same friend is pursuing Aerospace Engineering at IIT Bombay.
When Curiosity Becomes Your Compass
There’s a beautiful irony in how these “side quests” in our lives, pursuits we engage in purely for ourselves, often end up opening doors we never saw coming. Our educational system teaches us to chase external validation: marks, ranks, titles, offer letters. And yes, those benchmarks matter; we can’t pretend they don’t. But what outlasts any scorecard is the deep satisfaction of learning something on your own terms. That kind of learning leaves an indelible mark on your thinking, your personality, and your approach to problems. It becomes woven into your identity. And when it surfaces in an interview or conversation, people can sense its authenticity. It’s not rehearsed or manufactured, it’s real.
Making Space for Wonder
Here’s the advice I wish someone had emphasized to me earlier: Don’t let exam preparation be the only kind of learning you do. Choose one thing, technical or otherwise — that you explore purely because you want to. It could be experimenting with microcontrollers, writing poetry, mastering a new programming language, learning to paint, solving mathematical puzzles, or building your own browser extension. Whatever ignites your curiosity, give it space. Give it time. Give it the freedom to evolve naturally. Even during intense preparation periods, when time feels scarce, you’ll find yourself making time for the things that genuinely excite you. These are the pursuits that will sustain you when the academic grind becomes overwhelming.
A Parting Thought
To everyone navigating competitive exams, college admissions, job interviews, or any major life transition: Yes, preparation is demanding. Yes, much of it feels tedious and mechanical. But not all learning has to follow that pattern. Let there be at least one subject in your life that makes your eyes light up, something that belongs entirely to you, not to your syllabus or someone else’s expectations. You never know when that spark of genuine interest might illuminate an unexpected path forward.