1. The 3-5 close friends who will pick up your call at 3 AM ten years from now. 2. The ability to learn a completely new domain from scratch in two weeks without getting overwhelmed. 3. Your health, emotional resilience, and communication skills. Keep your GPA above the eligibility cutoff (usually 7.5 or 8.0), but don't sacrifice your youth and friendships chasing a 9.8.

In premier engineering institutes, you are surrounded by prodigies: Someone is a grandmaster on Codeforces, someone raised $50k for their startup, someone has two Nature papers. If you measure your self-worth against someone else's highlight reel, you will be miserable for 4 years. Compete only with where you were last semester.