First two years: mostly studied for exams, got decent marks, wrote code that worked but I didn't always understand why it worked. Followed tutorials for projects I didn't actually finish. Attended a hackathon once without even knowing what hackathon is !

Third year is when something shifted. I started building stuff not because it was assigned, but because I wanted to see if I could. I picked up full stack development — HTML, CSS, then JavaScript,.

And only in my final year I came to know about ..."wait, what even is a backend," then Node.js, then databases, then deployment, then "why is my API throwing errors at 2 AM." It was messy and non-linear and nothing like the curriculum. But it felt more real than anything else I'd done in college.

I still don't feel like an expert. I feel like someone who knows enough to know how much they don't know, which is maybe progress.