Done: MSc Finished, Merit Earned, and the 1.8% That Taught Me the Most

The end came fast. Final exam on January 19th. Flight to India on the 20th — booked with the confidence of a man who refused to imagine a resit. I’d been home a month — re-acclimatised to proper noise after a year of British silence — when the result landed on February 23rd:

MSc Artificial Intelligence, University of Surrey — passed with Merit.

One year. Two countries. One false start with Flash3D, one dissertation on scribble-guided 3D segmentation, and now three letters after my name that nobody will ever ask about but that changed what’s in my head completely.

The 1.8%

I’ll be honest about the part that stings: I missed Distinction by 1.8%.

That’s nothing. That’s one better coursework. One module bumped a grade band. And when I look at where the marks bled, it isn’t a mystery — my weakest results, consistently, were group projects. My individual work — exams, the dissertation, solo coursework — pulled upward; every group mark pulled down. The gap between what I could do alone and what my groups produced together is, almost exactly, 1.8%.

The lesson: don’t team up with your friends

Here’s the uncomfortable conclusion I’ve landed on, and I mean it sincerely: in group projects, never team up with your friends. Go with strangers.

It sounds cynical. It’s the opposite — it’s because the friendships matter that they wreck the work:

You can’t manage a friend. When a stranger misses a deadline, you say “this was due Tuesday, where is it?” When a friend misses one, you say “no worries man, all good” — and silently absorb their part at 2 AM. I did this more than once.
The social contract overrides the work contract. With friends, the unspoken priority is keeping the vibe intact. Hard feedback, splitting work by actual ability, calling out a weak section the night before submission — every correct move threatens the vibe, so none of them happen.
Friend groups assemble by affection, not by coverage. A team of strangers forms around the project: someone strong at writing, someone at code, someone who actually reads the marking rubric. A team of friends forms around lunch. Sometimes that means four people with the same gaps, all assuming someone else covers them.
Strangers perform professionalism. Nobody wants to look lazy in front of people who don’t owe them anything. That mild social pressure is worth more marks than talent.

The friends are not the villains of this story. The configuration is. The same people, met as strangers in a randomly assigned team, would probably have worked harder with me — and we’d still have become friends after, which is the correct order of operations.

Worth it

Merit, not Distinction. A year ago, pre-Surrey me — the one who wrote about having theory and no practice — would have taken this deal without blinking. I leave with a dissertation I can defend line by line, a 3D vision niche I genuinely love, an accidental masterclass in team dynamics, and the quietest year of my life behind me.

Back in India for now. The noise is wonderful. What’s next gets its own post.