Nobody Told Us the Goalposts Would Keep Moving
On World Suicide Prevention Day, a conversation with Dr. Gagandeep Kaur*, Counsellor at SETU, IIT Kharagpur, about why our campus feels heavy and what we can do about it.*
There is a particular kind of quiet that settles over IIT Kharagpur at 4 am. It is not the quiet of midnight. It is the quiet of hundreds of rooms with the lights still on, of half-finished assignments, of someone scrolling through an internship group at an hour when nobody should be awake.
We asked Dr. Gagandeep Kaur a question many of us circle around without saying out loud: why does this campus feel so sad and so stressed right now?
The first reason: an achievement-oriented mindset
Somewhere in the years of converting effort into ranks, she explained, achievement stops being something we do and starts being something we are. A bad grade is no longer a bad grade, it becomes evidence about our worth. A rejected internship application is not a company's decision; it becomes a verdict that “I am not worth it”.
And once you live that way, there is no finish line. You clear JEE and there is the CGPA. You fix the CGPA and there is the internship. Then the placement. The goalposts keep moving every single time you get close, so the 8-pointer you worked all semester for becomes, within a day, just the number you must not drop below. The win never gets to be a win. It turns straight into a baseline, and baselines are more feared than celebrated.
The smaller things vanish entirely. You went to class this week when getting out of bed was so hard for you. You submitted the assignment you were dreading. You called your mother back. None of it appears on a transcript, so we have trained ourselves not to count it, and then wonder why nothing feels like enough.
"You cannot celebrate anything," she said, "if the moment you arrive somewhere, you have already started measuring the distance to the next place."
There is a quieter cost too. JEE preparation is, for most of us, a deeply solitary journey, two years in which company itself becomes a distraction to be cut away. Then we arrive here, and the constant push towards the next achievement deepens that solitude rather than ending it. Every hour given to connection, to rest, or to simply being feels stolen from something that counts. We keep the habit of aloneness long after the exam that demanded it is over, without ever deciding to.
The second reason: societal expectations
A poor mid-semester grade stings, but it is a wound that heals with time. Then a parent asks about that same exam, and their disappointment tears open a failure you had already begun to move past. You look ahead but your collective memory refuses to.
It becomes an exhausting continuum of conditional worth. Miss an internship and your competence is questioned. Fall short of an arbitrary CGPA and your entire trajectory is cross-examined. Personal growth turns into an eternal validation system.
Here Dr. Kaur asked us to widen the frame.
Suicide is not only an individual crisis. It is also a community concern, shaped in part by the environments and expectations we create around one another. In highly competitive spaces the collective achievement mindset becomes a trap, where parental expectations and constant peer comparison turn another person's success into the measure of your own worth.
When we compare outcomes without accounting for differences in circumstance, context and starting point, we create an emotional burden that feeds inadequacy, isolation and emptiness.
Recognising this does not mean rejecting ambition. It means questioning a culture of comparison that has made achievement feel like the only measure of belonging and worth.
What she wants us to hear
"Life is not a sprint. It is a marathon."
A sprinter's logic is to go as hard as possible every second. That is fine for a hundred metres and catastrophic for forty years. A marathoner knows pace matters more than speed, that a bad kilometre is not a bad race, and plans for the stretch where the legs stop cooperating, not because they are weak, but because those stretches are part of the distance.
Said plainly: life is not a race with a finish timeline. There is no correct age to graduate, no schedule you are behind on. An extra year is not a lost year. A changed branch or a changed mind is not a detour off the path, for that person it is the path. Setbacks are not interruptions to a journey. Different journeys are simply shaped differently.
Talk it out. Do not keep it to yourself.
Say the thing out loud to someone you trust.
What makes campus stress dangerous is rarely the stress itself. It is the silence around it, the belief that you are the only one drowning in a hall where everyone else seems to be swimming fine. Ask any three people on your wing honestly, and two of them have been where you are.
So talk. To a friend at midnight. To a senior who survived the semester you are afraid of. To your family, even if it is hard. And to a counsellor, that is what they are there for, and no problem is too small to bring to that door. It is far better to spend a few hours talking to a professional than to suffer silently for days.
To whoever is reading this,
You are more than your CGPA, more than a placement outcome, more than what anyone at home is expecting. College is not the end of everything.
We underestimate how deeply human beings thrive on care, on belonging, on warm relationships. Achievements may shape what we accomplish, but connection shapes how we experience life. Reaching out, listening to someone, or simply letting another person know they are not alone can matter more than we realise.
You are on a hard kilometre of a very long race, and you are allowed to slow down, drink water, and tell someone that your legs hurt.
Please tell someone.
The Institute's counselling services are available to every student, confidentially and free of cost. If you are struggling, or think a friend might be, reach out.
SETU
Location: IIT Kharagpur, Kharagpur – 721302, India
Appointments: three ways
Via Phone
+91 3222 281173Visit SETU and take an appointment
Information is provided at the SETU front desk. Located opposite Technology Students' Gymkhana.
Location - https://maps.app.goo.gl/WLCYtHCnvB5fkL4VA
