BS (Data Science)
Gurneet Kaur Bhullar had a habit of cutting it close. She missed the first IITM application window by a single day. Instead of scrambling for the next term, she waited. She watched videos, read student feedback, and decided she’d apply only if the reviews were good. It turned out to be one of the smarter decisions she made in the whole four-year stretch.
Growing up in Mumbai, Gurneet loved Mathematics and found her way to a B.Sc. (Hons) Mathematics at NMIMS. But somewhere through it, she felt the pull of something more applied and technical.
She’d loved Java in 10th grade, and that instinct never quite left. When her father found the IITM BS Degree in Data Science and Applications in 2021 – built around actual programming and offered as a non-campus degree, the fit seemed obvious. She applied.
It was not the self-paced, figure-it-out-as-you-go programme she’d imagined. Quizzes, an end term exam, and a calendar that moved whether you were ready or not. She was already managing offline college, hour-long local train commutes. She studied during free lectures. She watched recorded classes at 1x while friends burned through them at 2x – and somewhere in the chaos of all of it, she figured out how to actually manage her time, because there was no other way through.
In early 2022, the Programme Office put out an idea: what if the BS degree had its own annual fest, on campus? Gurneet walked into the meeting and found scattered suggestions and a lot of energy going nowhere in particular. So she started collecting the ideas, shaping them into something that could actually be pitched. The POD wasn’t immediately sold – a hybrid degree pulling students from across the country onto a campus was not a small ask. But they cleared it.
She became one of its founding secretaries, and across late nights, stacks of paperwork, and meetings that never seemed to end, Paradox took shape.
The first Paradox was a crash course in exactly what the degree had been building. Gurneet landed in Chennai, navigated a campus she’d never walked before, chased approvals across departments, and handled COVID certificate requirements for thousands of registrations, all while her IITM quizzes kept arriving on schedule. She got through it because two years of managing two degrees at once had made her hard to knock off completely, but it was close.
She got her Deloitte placement around the same time – still at diploma level, through NMIMS. In the interview, they asked how someone from an academic background would handle industry pace. She ran through her IITM coursework, named what she’d studied, and described what she’d actually built. The degree gave her something specific to point to, and it mattered. Two candidates from her batch were placed. She was one. The job started well enough, but later they moved her onto Java, then Angular. The courses in her diploma had touched both, so she wasn’t rebuilding from scratch each time. She picked things up faster than the people around her and quietly ended up across the full stack, just by keeping pace.
By 2025, Gurneet had graduated from the BS Degree. She’s now putting together Masters applications, mostly in applied AI.
Her advice to anyone just starting: “Don’t panic. Have faith in yourselves.”
She wishes she’d told herself that on day one, when she was still on the outside, watching, trying to decide if it was worth it. Turns out, it was.
– written by Nehansh Kesharwani
