on july 11th i received a gold medal at the JNTUGV convocation. eighteen of us across the whole university. mine was for the highest marks in B.Tech artificial intelligence & machine learning, across every college affiliated with JNTU-Gurajada, for the 2021–2025 batch.
prof. v. v. subba rao handed it to me, along with my original degree certificate.
the medal going on. JNTUGV convocation, july 11th
a week later my college called me back to campus for photos. they wanted to put it in the newspaper.
and that evening i sat down and started writing a rant about them 🙂
the honest version of the medal
let me be accurate about what this is before i make it sound like more than it is.
it's 8 points. eight-point-zero. that's the grade behind the medal.
my college is in a tier-3 city. i knew from first year that i'd end up the topper — i genuinely knew, it wasn't a hope. not because i'm exceptional, but because i could see the room i was standing in. most people around me had no clarity and no fear about what came next, and i don't say that as an insult. they were interested in things they hadn't found names for yet.
so i never got pushed. i made minimal effort, passed subjects, enjoyed myself. if there had been one person genuinely competing with me i would have studied much harder, and i know that, which is the uncomfortable part.
there's one more thing i should say. AIML was a brand-new branch when our batch started — the first one at our college. which meant the faculty largely didn't know ML or DL themselves. they were teaching a syllabus that was new to them too.
what i actually know about machine learning, i learned from a friend.
he was my classmate up to 6th class in hyderabad, before my family moved to andhra when the states split. we didn't split. he went on to crack the exams i failed — i didn't qualify for EAMCET, and JEE main went badly too, through my own stupid mistakes. he stayed curious about everything, and through four years of engineering he taught me the things my curriculum never got to.
so the medal has his fingerprints on it more than the college's.
the rant
here's what i had ready to post:
recognition after success doesn't erase how they treated me before success.
i still think that line is true. that's why it was easy to write.
people in my college waited for me to fail. and the same institution that had nothing for me on the way up wanted a photograph for the newspaper on the way down from the stage. the line writes itself. it would have done well, honestly. that kind of post always does.
i didn't post it.
not because i became a better person. because i looked at the medal again and noticed something that killed the whole draft: it doesn't remind me of them at all.
i went looking for my anger and it wasn't in the object.
what's actually in it
when i look at it i see friends.
i see the late-night study sessions. the "you can do it" before every exam. people who quietly reminded me what i was capable of while others were quietly waiting for me to fall.
i see the friend from 6th class explaining a concept over the phone that nobody in my building could explain.
i see saitarun — the first time i met him i shouted "hey suresh!" at a stranger as a joke, and he answered "hey ramesh!" without missing a beat. we taught each other through intermediate, physics and chemistry from me, maths from him. we both failed EAMCET with ranks a few thousand apart, well past the one-lakh mark, which is somehow funnier than failing alone. we're working together again now, in our hometown.
i see my father's scolding, which was the actual turning point, though it took me years to file it under "help".
none of those people gave me a medal. they gave me the thing that made the medal possible, which is the willingness to keep going when i couldn't see the end of it.
the part i'm still sitting with
mayur patnala spoke at the convocation. his whole address came down to values over success, and what got me wasn't the phrase, it was how plainly he said it. no performance in it at all.
i've thought about that more than i expected to. because sixteen days after i stood on that stage as the AIML gold medalist, i sat in a screening round and couldn't answer the fundamentals.
both of those things are true about me in the same month. highest marks in artificial intelligence across a university, and unable to explain the basics when someone asked properly.
that gap is not the college's fault. i wanted to post a rant about an institution while carrying a hole in my own knowledge that i put there myself. writing the rant would have felt like accountability without being any.
so i wrote the other thing instead — the one about my friends. and i left the line about recognition in a drafts folder, where i think it belongs.
july 2026
i don't think i'll ever describe myself as a gold medalist as though it's a fact about my ability. it's a fact about a marks table in a specific building over a specific four years.
but i'm keeping it, and i'm glad about it, because of what it turned out to be a receipt for.
the receipt. original degree certificate, with the medal on
to my friends — i can't see this as mine. i see it as yours. you're the butterfly effect of this 🫂
#buildinpublic #learninginpublic #personal