On becoming someone you aren't, staying that person by accident, and the bill that arrives after everyone's gone home
The placement committee needs you to be a certain kind of person. For most of us, it is not the person we actually are.
The role runs on sternness. On being short. On a hardness in how you speak to a batchmate asking for something you can’t give, or a junior who has walked up at exactly the wrong moment. Some days it runs on shouting. And here is the part I want to put on record, because it’s the part nobody says out loud: most of the people you are being hard with are your friends. People you’d be gentle with in any other context. The role does not care. It needs the answer firm and the face to match, and it needs that from you whether the person across from you is a stranger or someone you’ve shared a corridor with for a year.
You can’t deliver that if you’re only half in it. I couldn’t, anyway. So I did the one thing that made it survivable... I stopped acting stern and started, for the duration, being stern.
Method Acting a Person I Wasn’t
I don’t know when it stopped being a performance. Early on it took effort. A conscious bracing before a hard conversation, a reminder to keep my voice flat, to not fold the second the person in front of me got upset. A few weeks in, it stopped taking effort. I could drop into that version of myself the way you change into a uniform, except the uniform was a temperament, and it went on faster every time until it was less something I put on and more something I forgot to take off.
That was the trade, and I did not understand it while I was making it. To be good at the role I let the role live in me instead of holding it at arm’s length. Actors talk about method acting as something that costs them, and I finally get why. You don’t build a convincing harder person from the outside. You find the part of yourself that could actually be that person, and you go live there for a while. The problem with living somewhere is that it becomes where you live.
In the beginning, warmth was the default and hardness was the effort. By the middle, that had flipped. Hardness was automatic and warmth was the thing I had to remember to reach for.
Seventeen hours a day, you are that person. And seventeen hours a day, in practice, is not seventeen hours. It’s all of them.
Why the Armor Is There
Before I go further into what it cost me, I owe the role some context, because it would be dishonest to talk about the hardness like committees just decide to be unpleasant for fun. They don’t. The hardness is inherited, and it’s inherited for a reason.
The stories get passed down, batch to batch. I can’t personally vouch for the older ones, but they’re told with enough consistency that they’ve become part of what everyone understands the role to be. Committee members set upon on the walk back to the hostel late at night, when the campus is empty and a bad decision has a face and that face is alone. Placement tents, the temporary ones that go up in peak season, supposedly set on fire after a cycle that went badly, because a tent burns and a market downturn does not. The placement office door, the one made entirely of glass, reportedly belted until it shattered, because glass breaks and the thing behind it doesn’t, and sometimes breaking the nearest object is the only available substitute for breaking the system it stands for.
You hear these before you ever sit on the committee. Everyone does. They work like an orientation nobody scheduled. This is what the role can attract. This is what a bad cycle can do to people. Keep your guard up.
And it isn’t only the dramatic, third-hand stuff. The everyday version I saw myself. Even in a cycle that wasn’t bad... a decent one, honestly, not half bad by any measure... I heard slurs aimed at the committee. Not whispered. I heard people pass judgment on the character of committee members, sweeping stuff about who someone must be as a person, based on nothing they had actually done and everything to do with the fact that they were on the committee at all. Being a member was, for some people, enough. You weren’t resented for a call you made. You were resented for the chair you sat in, and the call was just the excuse.
Once you’ve heard that, the sternness stops looking like cruelty and starts looking like self-defense. If you’ll be cast as the villain either way, you may as well be a competent one. The armor is not there because we enjoyed being hard. It’s there because being soft, historically, got you nothing, and in the worst tellings got you hurt.
You Are Never Off Duty
On paper you’re on the committee during committee hours. The actual rule, the one you absorb within a month, is that you’re on it always, because you’re always being read by people to whom your approachability is a signal.
Cross paths with a junior in the mess, or on the walk back at midnight, or standing in a queue for something with nothing to do with placements, and you cannot be warm. Not because you don’t want to be. Often I did. A committee member who seems approachable in the mess is a committee member who gets approached, right there, over dinner, about a slot or a shortlist that has no business being discussed over dinner. Warmth reads as an opening, so you shut it. You keep the face on. You nod and keep walking and make it quietly clear that this is not the moment, even when you both know there is no moment that would be.
There’s a loneliness in this I did not see coming. On paper you’re one of the most connected people in the batch. You know everyone’s status, everyone’s shortlists, everyone’s disappointments, you’re stitched into the single biggest thing happening in most people’s year. And you spend that year making yourself unreachable, holding people at exactly the distance the information demands. Central and untouchable at once. Those should cancel out. They don’t. That’s just the job.
And it compounds. You get good at holding people slightly away, and being good at it means the instinct stops switching off when it’s supposed to. It doesn’t announce itself. You just notice, later, that the guard you built for a reason is still up in rooms where there is no reason at all.
Getting Out Takes Longer Than You Think
Here’s the part I did not expect. Snapping out of the role is slow.
You’d assume it comes off the moment the day ends. It doesn’t. After hours of being the hard version of yourself, you don’t just walk out of the office and become soft again on the way to the mess. It lingers. The flatness stays in your voice for a while after you no longer need it, the way your ears keep ringing after you leave a loud room. If someone caught me right after a long committee stretch and I was short with them, it wasn’t because I meant to be. It was because I hadn’t finished coming down yet. The role has an exit ramp, and it’s longer than one conversation.
So you learn to give yourself that time. A gap. Some quiet on the walk back before you’re fit to talk to anyone who matters to you, because the person who steps out of that office is not, for another hour or two, someone you’d want answering a call from home.
And Getting Back In Is Its Own Job
The flip side is the part that actually surprised me. Once you’re out, once you’ve properly softened and stopped being that person, you can’t just flick back in when the next demanding day arrives. It doesn’t work like a switch you leave on. You have to commit to it again, fully, from the start.
That’s the strange economy of it. Building the hard self the first time was slow. Snapping out of it is slow. And every time you’ve genuinely stepped out, stepping back in costs the full price again, the same bracing, the same conscious decision to go be that person, because a half-committed stern face fools nobody and holds no line. There’s no coasting. You are either all the way in the role or all the way out of it, and the passage between the two takes real time in both directions. You can’t hover in between and expect to be any good at either side.
I didn’t understand that going in. I assumed the role would become something I could carry lightly, pick up and set down as needed. It never did. It only ever worked when I was completely inside it, which meant every genuine break was a small reset, and every return was a full commitment, over and over, for fourteen months.
What the Role Actually Asks
The committee doesn’t ask you to do a hard job. Plenty of jobs are hard. It asks you to become someone you’re not, well enough that even you start to buy it, for long enough that the buying leaves a mark.
The sternness, the coldness to friends and juniors, the shouting... none of it is optional, and none of it is really about being unkind. It’s about holding a line that only holds if the person holding it doesn’t flinch. Not flinching, all day, every day, means building a self that doesn’t flinch, and that self does not tidily take itself apart when the term ends. It exists in the first place because the soft version, the approachable committee, has historically been treated as prey. Cruel words in a corridor at the mild end, fire and broken glass at the other, if the old stories hold.
I’d do it again. I’ve said that before and I mean it. But I’d walk in this time knowing what I didn’t know the first time. The theatrics aren’t something you perform and put down. You perform them by becoming them, and becoming something, even for a while, is not a thing the rest of your life gets to stay out of. Wear the costume long enough and it stops being a costume. Nobody tells you that going in. It’s just the bill, and it shows up after everyone else has already left.