Dr. Sonam Dullet is a counsellor at the Student Counselling Cell of Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology (TIET), Patiala, one of India's oldest and most respected private engineering institutions, established in 1956 and known for its excellence in engineering education, research and innovation.
The counselling room is often the one place on campus where students stop performing. Not long ago, a final year engineering student sat across from me and said, almost apologetically, "I thought getting into a good college would make life easier." There had been no major failure. He had performed consistently well, came from a supportive family, and was preparing for placements. Then, after a long silence, came the real question. "If I don't succeed, what does that say about me?" That question has stayed with me, because I hear versions of it constantly, from students at every stage of college. The students who look most confident are not always the ones who feel most secure. Some of the highest performing students walk into the counselling room carrying fears no one around them would guess at. What they struggle with is rarely failure itself. It is the exhausting work of maintaining an image of success. "What if I disappoint my parents?" "Everyone else seems to know what they're doing except me." "Maybe I'm simply not good enough." The heaviest pressure students carry today is not the exam itself. It is the quiet belief that every exam, interview, and placement outcome is evaluating them not just as students but as people. Performance turns into identity, and once identity depends on achievement, success only brings temporary relief while every setback starts to feel like a verdict. Every generation has faced academic pressure. What is different now is that it coexists with constant digital comparison and careers that keep changing shape. Opportunities have widened, but so have expectations, and many students privately admit they are not sure what their own dreams actually look like. One pattern keeps showing up. Students rarely fall apart simply because something difficult happened. They fall apart when that experience starts answering a bigger question: what does this say about me. An exam measures preparation. A placement measures fit for a role at a moment in time. Neither measures a person's worth. Long before university, many Indian students spend years preparing for competitive exams, organising their lives around a single goal, and getting very good at finding the right answer. College hands them a different kind of question, one with no model solution. How do you respond when your best effort still falls short? How do you recover after rejection? One student once told me, "I wasn't afraid of not getting the job. I was afraid of going home and telling everyone I didn't." Sometimes fear is not failure. It is disappointing the people you love. This is why emotional resilience deserves as much attention as academic performance. Intelligence opens doors. Resilience decides how someone walks through them once life turns uncertain. Many students spend years chasing goals without pausing to ask what they actually want. Some of those goals come from family hopes, some from watching a friend succeed, and increasingly, many are shaped by social media, where visible achievements are held up as the definition of a life well lived. None of that is inherently harmful, until the noise from outside gets loud enough that a student can no longer hear her own voice, and ends up chasing what she believes successful people are supposed to want, rather than anything she actually wants herself. Helping students pick a profession may be the smaller half of what higher education owes them. The larger half is giving them room to find themselves. Comparison has always existed among students. What has changed is that it never switches off. A phone opens to someone celebrating an internship, an offer, a seemingly perfect life, and without meaning to, a student starts measuring an ordinary Tuesday against everyone else's highlight reel. The question quietly shifts from "am I growing" to "am I ahead." One of those builds something. The other starts a race nobody actually finishes. The mind is a brilliant storyteller. It evolved to notice danger faster than safety, which once protected us physically and now mostly amplifies emotional harm. One bad interview becomes "no company will ever hire me." Students speak to themselves in a tone they would never use with a friend. When I ask, "if your closest friend brought you this exact problem, would you say these words to them," almost every student pauses, smiles faintly, and says no. A simple, useful habit worth building is pausing before believing every thought that shows up, and asking, "is this a fact, or is this my fear talking?" That small pause opens up space to breathe before reacting, space to trade self criticism for curiosity. Emotional maturity has less to do with controlling every thought and more to do with deciding which ones deserve your trust. Students do not arrive at college as blank pages. They arrive carrying years of experience that already shapes how they see themselves, and none of that disappears at the college gate. A mentor's suggestion can feel like criticism. A small setback can reopen an old wound. The point of noticing these patterns isn't to assign blame to a family. It's to turn old experience into a choice instead of an instruction. Some of the deepest struggles have little to do with academics. They start with a quieter question: where do I belong? College is when young people are figuring out who they are while also trying to find where they fit, and in that search, students start adjusting themselves in small ways, agreeing when they want to disagree, hiding sadness because everyone else seems to be coping fine, staying in friendships that do not serve them. Slowly, belonging turns into performance. One question I often ask students is, "if you stopped trying to be who everyone expects, who would you actually be?" There is usually a long silence, not because they cannot answer, but because almost no one has ever asked them that before. True belonging isn't about becoming more acceptable to others. It's about becoming less afraid of who you already are. Conversations about student stress often become conversations about parental pressure, but most parents want exactly what their children want, a secure and meaningful future. The friction is rarely about intention. It is about interpretation. A parent asking "what happened to your marks" may simply be worried. A student hearing it may quietly conclude their worth depends on performance. Sometimes the more healing question is not "what happened" but "how are you feeling about what happened." This generation is not weak. It is managing a different kind of emotional complexity, expected to excel academically, stay constantly reachable, and measure itself against curated highlight reels while still working out who it is. That is overload, not fragility. Resilience might be one of the most misunderstood ideas in mental health. People tend to picture it as the absence of fear, failure, or pain, as staying strong all the time. The most resilient students I have worked with have cried after setbacks and doubted themselves. What set them apart was not avoiding those moments, but refusing to let those moments become their permanent identity. Going back to exactly who you were before is not really the point, since hard things do change us. The point is learning to carry what happened without letting it carry you. If resilience is not something people are simply born with, where does it come from? Students often ask me, "will this feeling ever go away?" The honest answer is rarely immediate, but it is almost always hopeful. Feelings shift. Circumstances shift. People grow. The trouble is that pain, while you are inside it, tends to feel permanent. But very little about life actually stays fixed. The students who eventually thrive are not the ones with the smoothest journeys. They are the ones who slowly learn that painful experiences can shape them without defining them. One of the most persistent myths about mental health is that seeking counselling is a sign of weakness. Most students who walk into that room simply want to understand themselves better and manage their emotions with more clarity. Seeking psychological support is no different from seeking a mentor for academics or a coach for fitness. It is an investment in wellbeing. Sometimes the strongest sentence a student can say is not "I can manage this alone" but "I think I need some support." Asking for help is not proof that resilience is missing. Often, it is exactly how resilience gets built. Student wellbeing should never rest on students alone. Families, teachers, and institutions all shape the environment young people learn, struggle, and recover in. Parents can keep encouraging excellence while making it clear that love was never conditional on achievement. Teachers can hold high academic standards while remembering that behind every assignment is a young person working through identity and uncertainty in real time. Institutions can build cultures where emotional wellbeing is treated as core to education rather than an optional add-on, and counselling centres should not exist only for moments of crisis. Universities are remembered for the professionals they produce, and just as much for the people they helped shape along the way. Years from now, few students will remember exact exam scores. What stays with them is whether they believed they were enough, whether someone listened when things got hard, and whether they learned to trust themselves without certainty. The world will remember some of your achievements. You are the one who has to live with the person you become while earning them. Your achievements will shape your career, but your relationship with yourself will shape your life.