I Failed Two Courses in the Same Semester. Then I Graduated With Distinction.

Semester four at IIT Kanpur. Signals and Systems and Electromagnetic Theory. Two Fs. One semester, two courses, two grades that I had been told, in the implicit but clear language of IIT culture, were not grades that people like me were supposed to get. I was the person from my school who had gotten a top 1000 rank. I was the person whose relatives called every Diwali to ask how IIT was going. I was not the person who failed two courses.

Except I was. And then I had to figure out what that meant and what to do next.

What Actually Happened

I can explain the failures technically: I had not understood the mathematical foundations of the courses well enough in the first half of the semester to follow the second half, and I had been too embarrassed to ask for help until it was too late to change the trajectory. The TAs had office hours. I never went. The professor had a standing offer to discuss concepts after lecture. I never stayed. I had learned, from twelve years of being good at school, that needing help was something that happened to other people.

The emotional reality was more complicated. I spent most of that semester knowing I was falling behind and doing nothing useful about it, which is a specific kind of paralysis that I think many academically high-performing students recognise: the gap between knowing what you should do and being unable to do it because doing it would require admitting how far you had already fallen.

The Year After the Fs

I retook both courses. I went to every office hour. I asked questions in lecture for the first time in my academic life. I formed a study group with three other students who had also struggled with the courses. This sounds straightforward and it was not; it required setting aside a self-concept that had been constructed around not needing the things that other people needed.

I also started working on electrical engineering problems that I actually found interesting, which had not been true of the two courses I had failed. This sounds like a trivial insight. It was not. Understanding which parts of a large field genuinely engaged me — rather than assuming that everything in my degree should be equally compelling — changed how I studied for the rest of my undergraduate.

Distinction

I graduated with an 8.7 CGPA. The two Fs are on my transcript and always will be. In two job interviews I have been asked about them directly, and I have answered directly: I failed because I did not seek help when I needed it, I retook the courses and performed well, and the experience changed how I approach problems I do not immediately understand. Both interviewers moved on without further comment. The grades are part of my record. They are not the whole story. Nothing on a transcript ever is.