Read at your own emotional risk, and maybe keep a snack nearby.

Today’s episode covers my first real admission heartbreak, and the MIST exam that followed it almost immediately after, like fate had scheduled my recovery arc before I’d even finished crying.

When HSC ended, I found myself stuck in that strange, directionless limbo so many of us know too well, half-heartedly wondering if I should pivot my entire goal. Then I had what I thought was a clever idea: sit for every public admission exam going, purely to build confidence, get comfortable filling out forms, and learn to function under pressure before the “real” tests.

Let me save you the trouble I put myself through: this was, without question, the first major mistake of my admission life. Admission season doesn’t gently build your confidence like a video game levelling you up. It just as often reveals, brutally and without warning, that the version of you who shines in coaching model tests can crumble completely inside a real exam hall. The reverse can happen too, but we’ll get to that.

I’d enrolled in an engineering-focused coaching centre, and I took it far too seriously, driven mostly by a very specific fear of missing out on whatever magic everyone insisted was happening there. The seniors, the “bhaiyas”, kept promising that all this grinding would be worth it eventually, and I believed them so completely that even a single weekly ranking could wreck my whole week.

My performance was honestly fine, steady, nothing alarming, but my brain treated every quiz like a referendum on my entire future. Should I keep pushing? Should I abandon the ship and pick a different subject while there’s still time? The self-doubt piled up quietly, and worse, I started outsourcing my self-worth entirely to other people’s reactions, living for compliments like “Allah, Sudipta, tui to onek porish” and “baba, ektu rest ne, hoye jabe tor.” Those words felt like fuel at the time, but looking back, I think this exact habit is what quietly warped my whole relationship with validation, a wound I’m honestly still working on healing even now.

Which brings me to mistake number two, and maybe the one I most want you to actually absorb: yes, admission results genuinely matter in a country that runs on where your degree comes from, and yes, a stable result from a good university does open doors and smooth out a few of adulthood’s rougher edges. But none of that means you owe anyone your entire sense of self-worth in exchange. Work hard because you respect your own effort, not because you’re mining other people’s approval, like it’s the only currency that counts. Own your mistakes, sure, gracefully even, but don’t let a ranking sheet decide whether you’re allowed to feel proud of yourself.

Now, about biology. Whoever knows me even a little knows that I despise it with the kind of passion usually reserved for mortal enemies in period dramas. A single page of biology and I’d already be spiralling, wondering why on earth I needed to memorise facts I had zero intention of ever internalising. So, predictably, when the medical admission exam approached, I barely bothered with “serious preparation”, and the gap between how vast that syllabus actually was and how little I’d covered turned into a canyon I had no way of crossing in time.

I dipped into a few free online model tests, found them brutally difficult, and switched to solving yearly questions instead, blissfully unaware of an open secret in the coaching world: most of those free model tests handed to engineering-track students are recycled from previous years, deliberately easier than what the genuinely dedicated medical aspirants were facing, which could be twenty times harder. It’s not some conspiracy against us, honestly, it’s just a smart design on the coaching centres’ part, giving casual test-takers a light taste of the exam format rather than the real thing.

So, long story short: I underestimated an entire national exam, crammed for two and a half days (I promise I’m not exaggerating for effect), and didn’t get in. I was devastated in a way that felt disproportionate even to me at the time. The exam fell on a Friday, and I cried until my head genuinely throbbed, having convinced myself beforehand that I was somehow above being affected by the outcome. Spoiler: nobody is above that.

The very next day was the AFMC exam, and I actually did well, or at least well enough by my own standards. But stepping out of that hall, I overheard people discussing the brutal cutoff marks, and something in me just switched off. I never checked the results website.

To this day I have no idea what that dashboard even looks like, because I asked my parents, quite seriously, to never mention it to me even if a message came through. “I’m scared of blood, I can’t be a doctor,” I told them, which was true, but honestly, it was also just easier to say than admitting how thoroughly I’d let myself down.

Here’s the part where the story could have just stopped, grief and all, except the universe apparently runs on a very tight and unsympathetic schedule, because the MIST admission test was scheduled for the very next week, arriving practically before my medical exam grief had even finished unpacking. Seniors kept telling me MIST was supposedly the easiest exam on the circuit, which felt like a cruel joke given that my syllabus was nowhere near complete and I spent a solid two or three days just staring at the ceiling asking myself if I was even built for this race at all.

Eventually, and I mean eventually, I pulled myself together enough to focus on the one thing actually in front of me. Forget the bigger picture for a moment, I told myself, just get through this one exam first, and figure out the rest of your life later. Since full preparation was off the table, I leaned entirely into revising what I’d already covered, cycling through the question bank repeatedly instead of chasing topics I had no realistic hope of finishing in time.

In organic chemistry and mechanics specifically, I only solved board-level questions, refusing to chase difficulty I couldn’t actually handle in the time left. It might sound almost lazy written down like this, but there’s a kind of quiet wisdom in knowing exactly which battles are winnable and which ones will just drain you for nothing. Also, unrelated but worth mentioning here because it mattered to me during this whole stretch: I used to read the newspaper with my mother most evenings, just for the calm of it, and I’ll actually write more about that ritual in a future piece, because it deserves its own space.

When I finally sat for the MIST exam, my first move was simply scanning the paper to gauge whether I could realistically finish it in time. And somehow, against every ounce of doubt I’d been carrying for days, I finished with forty-five minutes to spare, using the extra time to fill in the questions I’d been unsure about the first time around.

So here’s my honest two cents, the kind I wish someone had handed me before all of this. However hard it feels to trust the process, trust it anyway, because the process, in some strange way, knows you’re leaning on it, and it rewards that persistence more often than panic ever does. If you walk into an exam without having revised everything, and you won’t have, nobody ever does, don’t spiral. Just try not to fumble with what you already know well.

Partial marks add up faster than perfectionism ever will, so anchor yourself in the board-level basics first, since those patterns repeat more than people admit. Inside the exam hall, read each question twice with the calm of someone who has absolutely nothing to prove, and if an answer doesn’t come, move on without guilt. It genuinely isn’t over until it’s over.

But if there’s one thing I want you to carry out of this particular chapter, more than any exam strategy, it’s this: don’t let any single result, or any single person’s approval, become the measuring stick for your worth as a human being. I lost pieces of myself in that stretch chasing validation I didn’t even need, and it took me a long time afterward to remember that I was allowed to be proud of my effort regardless of what a scoreboard said about it.

Admission season will ask a great deal of your time and your nerves, that part is unavoidable, but it never has permission to take your sense of self along with it. Guard that fiercely, even when everything around you insists it isn’t important.

I’ll see you in the next chapter of this diary, where we’ll get into what came next on this rather chaotic road. Until then, be relentlessly, almost stubbornly kind to yourself. You genuinely deserve it.

Read part 1: Choosing the battlefield