Near the end of 2016, I started avoiding our club advisors.
I had a pretty good idea what they wanted to talk about. Hirok and Narjis were close to graduation, ROBU would need a new presidential panel, and I did not want the job.
What I did not understand yet was that most of the difficult part had already happened. I had spent years getting to know the people who would eventually make whatever came next manageable.
The hike that changed how we knew a professor
Around 2015, ROBU arranged a trip to Bandarban. A faculty member had to travel with us, and Dr. Amitabha Chakrabarty volunteered.
For many CSE students, Dr. Amitabha was intimidating. He was known for his academic work, but students also knew that getting good marks in his courses was not easy. I certainly did not think of him as someone I would casually joke with.
Then we went hiking together.
Heavy rain had damaged the road, so part of the journey turned into a long uphill walk. For people who had barely hiked before, including me, two or three kilometres on those roads felt enormous. Some students were exhausted enough that they were almost in tears.
Dr. Amitabha looked exhausted too. He kept motivating everyone to walk, but every few minutes he would also start questioning the entire trip, saying things along the lines of, "Why do we have to have such a trip? It's not for everyone. I can walk, but most of the students can't. We should not do this." He was still encouraging us, but you could clearly hear how tired he was.
Narjis had a different system. Every time she became too tired to continue, we would start singing "O Bondhu Lal Golapi" at her until she got up and walked another hundred metres or so. Then she would stop again, and we would repeat the process. Somehow that got all of us to the cottage where we stayed for the night.
After that trip, Dr. Amitabha was no longer just a strict professor I knew from university. He knew us beyond the classroom. I became comfortable enough around him that I could even joke with him, still with the obvious respect and boundaries of a faculty-student relationship. In Bangladesh, that difference can feel surprisingly large.
A different kind of trip
The next year, probably in 2016, we planned another trip through Rangamati, Khagrachhari, Sajek Valley, and nearby places. Naturally, we asked Dr. Amitabha again.
He had already learned what travelling with us could involve. His answer was something along the lines of, "I don't want to break my bones at this age."
So we went to Saiful Islam instead.
Saiful Sir had studied at BRAC University himself before becoming a lecturer there. That made the relationship slightly different. He was still faculty, so there was always some distance, but he was also a senior alumnus who understood university life from our side.
We also did not spend too much time explaining what ROBU trips could be like. Fortunately for him, this one had almost no hiking. We spent much of it moving between places by Chandergari and visiting different spots over several days.
On the second night, we were staying in Sajek. There were around forty of us, maybe a little more, spread across several cottages. Saiful Sir had been given a room with Hirok and me. I still suspect someone had pushed us into that room as a punishment. Staying with the faculty member was obviously not supposed to be the fun option. But somehow, the exact opposite happened.
Close to midnight, Hirok, Narjis, and I were still outside walking around. Sajek was almost completely dark. There were hardly any lights around us, but the sky was packed with stars. It was one of those nights when the darkness made the sky look much bigger.
Far away, we noticed someone walking toward us. At first we could not tell who it was. When he came closer, we realized it was Saiful Sir.
He said he did not feel like staying inside and had come out to talk to us.
A little later, we started teasing Narjis. She was uncomfortable in the darkness, so Hirok and I would suddenly run away from her and make her chase us.
Then we noticed something unexpected: Saiful Sir was running too.
For the next hour or so, the faculty member who was officially there to supervise all of us became part of the same nonsense. We were walking around in the dark talking about ghosts and Bhoot FM, which was probably not helping anyone. At one point we told him he should go back and sleep. We had slept in the car and were happy to stay outside.
He did not want to go.
After enough poking, we finally got the real answer. Saiful Sir was also afraid of the dark and did not want to stay alone, especially somewhere as remote as Sajek.
So the person responsible for us stayed outside with the students who were supposed to be his responsibility.
That was generally how our relationship with supportive faculty members evolved. The university hierarchy never disappeared, but after enough workshops, projects, trips, and ridiculous nights like that, they stopped feeling like distant authority figures.
That same trip also left behind one very specific 2016 artifact. The mannequin challenge was everywhere, so I made our own mannequin video with Hirok, Narjis, some of her friends, and three juniors who had recently joined us: Farabi, Muntasir, and Riyad.
The juniors who kept showing up
Farabi, Muntasir, and Riyad had joined around the same time as a group of friends. They were mostly involved with event management, and they were wonderfully easy to annoy.
During the trip they stayed around Hirok, Narjis, and me most of the time. Narjis and her friends apparently wanted more girls in the group. Instead, they got Farabi, Muntasir, and Riyad. So we solved the problem ourselves. Farabi became Fariba, Muntasir became Muntaha, and Riyad became Raida. The names started as a trip joke and somehow survived through the rest of our club life.
They were not the most robotics-focused people in ROBU. That never mattered much. They were very good at events, and over time they became the kind of juniors I could call whenever something needed to get done.
Another group I was close to included Rafat, Ahnaf, Tridiv, and Pinon. They were more technical, although their formal roles did not necessarily say so. Rafat's team mostly handled graphics and creative work, and Rafat was one of those irritating people who seemed to be good at almost everything. He was excellent at graphic design and very strong technically too.
At one point I became too busy to finish one of my own course projects, so I handed it to Rafat. He built the hardware and web dashboard for a smart prepaid energy meter, and the project received full marks. That was the kind of person Rafat was. I could hand him something technical and trust him to figure it out.
Then there were Tarin Sultana Sharika, Rowshni Tasneem Usha, and Fariha Sazid. All three were from CSE, all three had very good CGPAs, and all three were the kind of students who were good at the things I was not particularly good at.
They mostly worked through HR and other club activities, but one of the most useful things they did for us was writing. Technical work still needed reports, proposals, descriptions, applications, and plenty of other documents. Sometimes we would give them a rough draft, sometimes just the technical details, and they would turn it into something presentable. That saved me more times than I can remember.
They also had very different personalities. Fariha was the serious one. She often looked like she might get angry at any moment, so I was probably more careful when talking to her than I actually needed to be.
Sharika could look serious too, but I had already destroyed any chance of being intimidated by her. I used to call her "Picchi," basically "little kid" in Bangla, because she looked small to me. The nickname somehow survived for years. Near the end of university she would complain, "Why do you still call me Picchi? I'm not a Picchi anymore." I did not consider that a convincing argument.
Rowshni was much quieter. She had this innocent expression that made it difficult to stay annoyed with her even if something went wrong. To me she looked like another kid, just a slightly bigger one than Picchi.
Between the three of them, they helped me enormously with HR work, workshops, and the writing side of the club. I disturbed them with plenty of work over the years, and they kept helping anyway.
There were many more juniors, of course. I knew a surprising number of them personally because I kept taking robotics workshops. Teaching people repeatedly has that effect. They stop being names on a membership list.
Robotics did not belong to R&D
One thing I liked about ROBU during that period was that robotics was never treated as the property of the R&D department. If someone from Creative, Events, or HR wanted to learn, they learned. A department described what you were responsible for, not what you were allowed to be curious about.
That changed the club in small but fun ways. Creative members who once might have decorated something with ordinary lights could make them blink in a sequence, respond when someone walked past, or animate the ROBU logo. People designing posters understood the machines they were representing. Event people understood what competition teams needed. Almost everyone could participate in the technical side when they wanted to.
Then the club suddenly became smaller
Near the end of 2016, several senior members left ROBU after an internal disagreement. A large number of juniors who were close to them left too.
That part hurt much more than I expected.
Many of those juniors were people I had taught, travelled with, taken to competitions, and spent hours talking to about whatever they wanted to build next. Some would come to me with a new idea or ask for advice, and I had assumed we still had years of that ahead of us.
Looking back, I think that was when I first understood that seniors and juniors do not have the same things to lose. A senior may already have had years of projects, competitions, friendships, and opportunities from a club. A junior who leaves halfway through university may be walking away before getting any of those things.
At the time I mostly saw people leaving. Years later, I understood that some of the people with the most to lose were probably the youngest ones.
But leaving ROBU did not mean I stopped caring about them. Some of them still came to me later with project ideas, questions, or things they wanted advice on. I never saw a reason to say no.
The people I kept seeing were the same people I had grown close to through trips, workshops, graphics work, events, projects, and endless small requests. Farabi, Muntasir, Riyad. Rafat, Ahnaf, Tridiv, Pinon. Sharika, Rowshni, Fariha. Sakib and Arko. And others who had stayed around.
Until then, I had mostly thought of them as the people who made club life fun and helped whenever I disturbed them with another task. After the split, I started to understand that they were also the people holding the club together.
The conversation I was trying to avoid
The timing was terrible. Hirok and Narjis were close to graduation, so ROBU needed a new presidential panel just as the club was recovering from the split.
The university had also changed the rules around faculty advisors. Dr. Md. Khalilur Rahman had been with ROBU from the beginning and had supported project after project, but officially the advisor role now had to change. Dr. Amitabha Chakrabarty became the new advisor, with Saiful Sir also closely involved.
For us, that transition was much easier than it could have been. Dr. Khalilur Rahman was not going to stop supporting us because his official title changed. Dr. Amitabha already knew us well, thanks in part to one miserable hike in Bandarban. Saiful Sir had already spent a late night in Sajek running around with us because none of us wanted to go to bed.
The faculty side of the club did not scare me.
The responsibility did.
By then I was already spending a lot of my time on technical work, including a project that would eventually become BRACU Duburi. I was afraid that taking on more responsibility would pull me away from the part of university life I enjoyed most: building things.
If Sakib was willing to take it on, I was perfectly happy with that solution.
So for a while I did the mature and responsible thing: I tried to avoid the advisors.
By then, I still did not want the responsibility that seemed to be coming toward me.
What I had not noticed was that I was no longer standing there alone.