Pick the Room, Not the Brochure (Reboot)

I used to think college was a stack of PDFs and a decent attendance record. Then my bachelor’s cohort happened chaotic, creative, funny to the point of snort-laughs, and permanently parked outside the box. We turned dry seminar prompts into improv, stapled zines out of abandoned handouts, solved stats with doodles and worse puns. It was Dead Poets Society energy on a shoestring “Carpe diem. Seize the day.” We did, repeatedly, usually with chai and a Google Doc open at 1:12 a.m.

Years later, London reminded me how tiny the world is when your batch was good. I’ve run into Pune classmates in the oddest places: a Shoreditch basement where the kid I used to fight over APA commas was suddenly the DJ; a Soho gallery queue where a former group-project nemesis waved like we were cousins. Those collisions felt like plot twists from a film I love: “We get to choose who we’re going to let into our weird little worlds,” as Sean tells Will in Good Will Hunting. We chose well. And our weird little worlds kept overlapping across continents.

My master’s cohort… wasn’t that. Brilliant individuals, yes. But the room rarely crackled. The default wasn’t “How do we make this ridiculous and excellent?” It was “What’s the rubric?” Maybe it was me, maybe timing, maybe the way interactions slid into polite transactions. The mischief didn’t catch, the collective dare to do better didn’t land. No one was saying Jerry Maguire’s “Help me help you” and then actually ripping my draft apart to make it sing. I missed the bench that made me arrive five minutes early and submit a day sooner. I missed the nudge that says: run at excellence, the marks will pant behind you “Success ke peeche mat bhaago, excellence ka peecha karo.”

Here’s the lesson I can’t unlearn: content is everywhere now; cohorts are not. You can stream lectures, download papers, prompt an essay. You can’t download a table that won’t let you play small. “It’s not about how hard you hit; it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward,” Rocky says and the right classmates make “getting hit” (critique, rejection, stage fright) a team sport. The wrong room makes it a solo injury.

People like to chant “your network is your net worth” until the words lose vitamins. But when I run the tape back, my network isn’t a pile of names. It’s three simple scenes:

• Me, 11 p.m., texting a messy draft and waking up to useful line-by-line notes.

• A classmate introducing me like a co-owner: “Loop her in; she’ll make it better.”

• Building one scrappy thing together (a paper, a fest, a failed hackathon) and learning more than we scored.

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That’s not contact; that’s compounding. Naval Ravikant’s looped line fits here: play long-term games with long-term people. Long-term people don’t vanish after the group photo. They keep showing up, years later, in Shoreditch basements and gallery queues.

If you’re choosing a college now, pick the room, not the brochure. Sit in on a society meeting. Eavesdrop at the canteen. Watch who thanks the organiser after an event, who stays back to coil the mic cable, who sends sources without peacocking. The Social Network flexed with “A million dollars isn’t cool; you know what’s cool?” for our purposes: a million PDFs isn’t cool; you know what’s cool? A table that edits you into your next self.

Psychology backs the intuition. We copy each other’s norms. Sit beside question-askers and you’ll start asking; orbit builders and you’ll start building. Bridge groups be the one who shuttles ideas between psych club and product lab, theatre and data because the broker sees patterns first. And when the room is right, failure stops feeling terminal. The Lord of the Rings whispers, “All we have to decide is what to do with the time given to us.” Spend it where drafts get braver and attempts get weirder.

Do I regret my master’s? No. It taught me the contrast the value of a room that crackles. It underlined why my bachelor’s bench still pays dividends in confidence, curiosity, and the odd London cameo. If college is your launchpad, your cohort is the rocket fuel. Choose the people who make you rewrite paragraph two, kill paragraph four, and cite better in paragraph six. Choose the ones who clap when you bomb and still book the room for your next talk.

Hogwarts wisdom time: “It is our choices, far more than our abilities, that show what we truly are.” Choose the room that dares you. And if you can’t find it, build it one awkward coffee, one midnight debug, one honest edit at a time. The degree prints once. The cohort keeps printing. May the Force be with the friends who refuse to let you phone it in.