BS (Data Science)
At 19, when most students are just starting college and figuring out life for themselves, Sadiya Maheen Siddiqui is already in the Degree level of the IITM BS Degree in Data Science and Applications.
She scored 99.29 percentile in JEE Mains and qualified for Advanced, but the whirlwind began right after – counselling, options, and constant second-guessing. In that rush, she came across the IITM BS program, and it felt like the first clear option in days. The name IIT Madras, with its NIRF ranking, along with the flexibility of hybrid learning, matched what she was looking for. “I immediately made the payment and enrolled,” she said, and that single click became her way of choosing a path on her own terms.
She walked in with fairly standard expectations – recorded modules, live sessions and assignments. But once she stepped into the program, she found IITM professors, hands-on projects, and vivas conducted by industry professionals, enough to reset her sense of what hybrid could demand.
“I thought this would be less rigorous because of its hybrid nature. But it’s not,” she said. For her, it was a simple case of no pain, no gain the tougher it got, the more real the learning felt.
That mindset stayed with her. From the Foundation level onward, Sadiya took the maximum courses each term and later added NPTEL courses to build credits faster. But when you least expect it, life throws a curveball, and for Sadiya, it was the BDM project, which didn’t wrap up in a single term the way she’d planned. It pushed her outside her comfort zone – she spoke to real businesses, tried to work with their actual data problems, and realised it was time to step back and strategize. “I had to step back and plan,” she said. It took her another term to complete it and she went back in with a clearer plan and finished it.
By BSc level, she’d cracked the code through sheer consistency. Live sessions became sacred – no matter the hour. “Never procrastinate. Never miss live sessions and don’t be shy asking questions,” she shares her mantra with others now, and that very rhythm changed everything for her.
Later, this discipline circled back when the work stopped being theoretical. Through IITM, she landed an internship at the Hyderabad Metro Water Board, where she was trusted with datasets spanning lakhs of resident records! The database concepts from her diploma-level DBMS course, along with the cloud-first mindset she built in MLOps, became the backbone that kept her work clean and reliable.
Later, this advanced knowledge fueled her own research, resulting in published papers on fake news detection and low-latency drug interaction systems. It was clear that the program was teaching her how to build and not just how to code.
By late 2026, she plans to finish her BS degree along with the PG diploma. After that – MTech, research, or her own AI startup – whatever path lets her create novel AI applications the world hasn’t seen. But one thing’s certain – what she’s running after is creation, not credentials.
When asked what she would have told herself on day one, she said without any hesitation. “Don’t think twice. Just step into it and keep moving. Keep learning every single day. Ask questions, and do it now.“
There’s a clarity that comes from knowing what you want at 19. The kind that makes you move fast when doors open. The kind that’ll have her on stage in five years, unveiling AI systems the rest of us didn’t know we needed.
And it all started with one click.
– written by Nehansh Kesharwani
