I Was Doing Everything and Going Nowhere-How Final Year Actually Feels
Nobody talks about the paralysis. Let’s talk about it.
Some days I wake up and I am on fire.
I apply for internships. I work on my resume. I research companies. I write. I plan. I feel like the version of myself I am supposed to be by now.
And then there are the other days.
The days where I open my laptop, stare at seventeen browser tabs — MNC applications, government exam syllabus, a half-finished newsletter draft, someone’s LinkedIn post about their Microsoft offer — and I close the laptop and pick up my phone instead.
Two hours later I surface from a scroll I cannot account for, vaguely guilty, vaguely anxious, and somehow more tired than before I started.
This is final year.
Not the version they put in the brochure , the confident graduate, the polished resume, the clean linear story of achievement leading to opportunity. The real version. The one that feels like standing at the centre of a roundabout with ten roads leading out and no signs on any of them.
The List That Breaks You
Here is what my list looked like for a while.
Get placed at a good company. Start a startup. Appear for GATE. Prepare for CAT. Study for GS. Get a research internship. Build a portfolio. Write consistently. Network more. Learn new skills. Apply to Goldman Sachs. Apply to Google. Apply to everything.
I am not exaggerating. That was genuinely the list.
And here is what happens when your list looks like that.
You do not do any of it.
Not because you are lazy. Not because you do not care. But because your brain — faced with ten equally urgent, equally important, equally terrifying priorities simply refuses to begin. It is not procrastination. It is paralysis. And paralysis looks exactly like laziness from the outside, which makes it worse, because now you are not just stuck , you are also ashamed of being stuck.
What Nobody Tells You About Ambition
There is a version of ambition that moves you forward.
And there is a version that pins you to the floor.
The pinning kind comes from wanting everything at once. From believing that choosing one path means losing all the others. From measuring your progress against everyone else’s highlight reel — the classmate who got a PPO, the LinkedIn connection who is interning at a firm you have only heard of in case studies, the senior who seems to have figured out, effortlessly, the thing you are still searching for.
I spent a long time in that kind of ambition.
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Wanting to be the person who built a startup and cracked CAT and had a perfect GitHub and ran a successful newsletter and played sport at national level and had a social life and also somehow felt calm about all of it.
That person does not exist. I know that now.
But knowing it and feeling it are different things entirely.
The Day It Shifted
It did not happen dramatically.
There was no single moment of clarity, no conversation that unlocked everything, no morning I woke up with the answer.
It happened slowly. Through small actions taken on bad days. Through applying for one thing even when I felt unready. Through writing one paragraph even when the whole article felt impossible. Through showing up to one thing at a time instead of trying to show up to everything simultaneously.
I started to notice that the days I felt best were not the days I had planned the most.
They were the days I had done one real thing.
One application submitted. One article published. One conversation had. One project pushed forward by a single commit.
That was it. One thing. Done imperfectly. Done anyway.
What I Actually Learned
Final year is not a test of how much you can do.
It is a test of whether you can keep moving when everything is uncertain.
Whether you can apply before you feel ready. Build before it is perfect. Show up before you are confident.
The students who come out of this well are not the ones who had it figured out. They are the ones who kept taking small, imperfect steps forward even on the days, especially on the days when it felt completely pointless.
I am still in it. I do not have a neat conclusion or a job offer to tie this together with.
But I submitted the Goldman Sachs application. I published an article on GeeksforGeeks. I wrote this.
And tomorrow I will do one more thing.
That is enough.
If you are a final year student reading this at midnight with too many tabs open, you are not behind. You are not broken. You are just in it. Keep going.
Anushka Yadav is a final-year B.Tech CSE student at IPS Academy, Indore. National Finalist at SIH 2025, NCC ‘C’ Certificate holder, national-level athlete, and chronic overthinker turned writer. She writes about campus life, careers, and everything college forgot to teach you.
