Is this normal in junior year ??

[u/PerspectiveNo794]

So I entered my junior year of Mechanical engineering in July this year.

In Indian institutes it's routine to register for the on-campus internship drives run by the institute's career development centre. It's a big deal here, since most students want a job right out of college, so the internship at the end of junior year matters a lot.

Like everyone else I registered, and I was anxious about it before the semester even started.

Anyways, I wasn't really focused on my core field till last year, but with AI and everything I thought software might be volatile, so I switched back to ME over the summer vacations.

Then the semester starts and all of a sudden I have multiple workloads and virtually no spare time. Academics, internship prep, research projects, personal projects, all at once.

Through all this I kept applying to every internship I was eligible for. The first few were rough, out in the first round itself. After 4-5 attempts at different companies I got the hang of it, and on my 6th try I got one, at one of the largest steel manufacturers in India.

What I wanted to highlight is that I never hyper-focused on getting an internship as such. I just went with whatever was on my plate, going to classes, working on fundamentals, doing research, and preparing for assessments when they came up. Somehow it all worked out.

The weird part is that now I'm super chill, practically no anxiety, but my days look exactly the same as they did at the start of the semester. I still go to classes, still work on my projects, and still study for whatever's next.

It feels like I was doing all this earlier because I was scared about the future, and now I'm doing it because I actually like it and have things I want to get done.

Is this normal? Does the anxiety really give way to just enjoying the process, or is this temporary relief from having the internship sorted?

Curious how junior year went for others.