A friend of mine recently sat for a company placement round that had a Group Discussion (GD) stage. The instructions were simple but cruel: convince us why you are a better fit than everyone else in this room. The irony was glaring. Half the “everyone else” were people he had been friends with for three years. Now, in front of suited-up recruiters, they had to poke holes in each other’s arguments, interrupt politely-but-not-too-politely, and smile while dismantling their friend’s points.
That little scene sums up the strange transformation of college life for engineers. You enter with wide eyes, desperate to blend into the crowd, and you leave fighting tooth and nail to stand out from it. Somewhere between fresher-year cafeteria bonding and final-year placement battles, friendships morph, fracture, and reassemble in ways that can feel both natural and uncomfortable. College is less about four years of lectures and more about one long social experiment: can you go from being part of the pack to proving you’re better than the pack without losing your friends in the process?
Year one: Operation “Please don’t let me sit alone”.
The first year is a buffet of insecurity. Everyone walks around with the same nervous grin, trying to make sure they don’t look lost while secretly being very lost. Out of this shared awkwardness, gigantic friend groups form overnight. Suddenly, you’re part of a gang of twenty people whose only common trait is that they all feel like dropping out or switching majors within the first friggin week.
Uniformity becomes survival. If the group wears checked shirts, you wear checked shirts. If the group skips lunch in the mess to go eat pizza, you go too (while praying you don’t go bankrupt). Hostel gossip, complaints about your professors, and ordering food late-night become social glue. Even course choices get influenced by the pack — how else do you explain four engineers in a group all suddenly becoming interested in forensic science electives?
These groups give you a ready-made identity and shield you from the terror of being alone. In fresher year, fitting in is not just desirable, it’s mandatory.
The cracks appear midway through college.
Then, somewhere in the second or third year, the tectonic plates shift. That gang of twenty starts shrinking into smaller units, like amoebas dividing. People discover they don’t actually like the same things. One is into debate club, another is obsessed with coding contests, a third spends nights practicing guitar instead of solving LeetCode problems.
Internships and projects expose differences more sharply. Suddenly, conversations aren’t just about what’s for dinner but about who got an interview at which company. “Oh, you’re doing research under that professor?” slips into “Why didn’t I get that spot?” Rivalry seeps in but not in the dramatic, soap-opera way, but in sideways glances and polite comparisons.
It’s not that friendships vanish; it’s that they gain background noise. Every hangout session carries a faint hum of “Where do I stand next to them?”
The final years: From friends to competitors.
By the final stretch, the mood shifts from “we’re all in this together” to “may the best candidate win.” Placements, GRE scores, CAT exams, civil services prep — suddenly every friend is also a benchmark. You can still laugh about your disastrous PBL project, but you’re also calculating how to edge past them in an interview.
Group Discussions, the corporate world’s version of gladiator fights, make the rivalry explicit. Picture ten friends in a circle, instructed to argue until only the sharpest one remains standing. My friend’s GD experience is almost allegorical. Colleges condition you to collaborate for three years, then ask you to dismantle that collaboration in the fourth.
To be clear, this doesn’t always breed hostility. Often, it’s more subtle. People quietly polish their LinkedIn profiles, attend certification courses, and rehearse self-introductions in front of mirrors. Everyone wants to stand out, because for the first time, sameness is no longer protection, it’s a liability.
So, what does this mean?
Should we mourn this shift? Not really. It’s both sad and natural. It’s just college mimicking life in the way that you start by blending into communities, but you eventually need to assert your individuality. Friendships don’t have to dissolve in the process; they just change shape. Instead of being about identical interests, they become about respecting each other’s differences and ambitions.
The challenge is less about outsmarting your peers and more about staying human while doing it. Can you compete without becoming cutthroat? Can you aim to win while still clapping when your friend does? That balance is trickier than any exam. The real education lies in learning when to merge with the crowd and when to step out of it.
Perhaps the toughest task isn’t proving you’re better than your friends. It’s proving you can grow without losing them.
Liked this article? To read more about how identity shifts with context, check out Aahana‘s article In the Eyes of Others. And of course, more of my work’s just a click away.