BS (Data Science)
Currently, 21-years old Darshan Ganatra is living on the IIT Madras campus, where he is a teaching assistant for the MAD-2 course. He is attending offline classes alongside students from the main programme, and also finishing the last stretch of his BS. It started, as most good things in his life seem to, almost by accident – a late night, a browser tab, and one day before his English board exam.
It happened completely by chance when he was browsing for what he wanted his future to look like. He had always been interested in Data Science, yet the other degrees out there just didn’t feel right.
Their curriculums were either too broad or unfocused, and he wanted something that would take him right where he wanted to go professionally and intellectually, and he found that in the IITM BS Degree in Data Science and Applications.
He was 17, and had no fallback plan, no parallel on-campus degree, and no one else he knew was doing what he did. When he told people, the reaction was always the same. “Everyone was shocked,” he says, almost amused by it now. “Everyone was like, you are not doing any degree alongside. How are you going to manage?”
While most kids his age were hedging their bets, Darshan was placing his.
He admits that he kept his head down for the first two terms, focusing on studying and finding his footing in the degree, then in his third term, a random WhatsApp message from someone wanting to start a sports society caught his eye, and since Darshan had nothing else to do, he replied.
That message eventually became Sportify, the Sports Society of IITM BS Degree, that now has a team of thirty people, growing from Darshan and two others, who initially did everything by themselves. “Making PPTs, hosting, planning, managing Instagram. All three of us,” he says. Darshan discovered that he was someone who liked being in the middle of things and making them work.
That was confirmed at Paradox in 2024, when he came to campus for the first time as a TA for MAD-1 and found himself pulled into the orbit of the fest immediately. The night before Paradox, there was an issue with the entry cards, three thousand five hundred of them had to be handwritten. Darshan stepped up and spent the entire night working on them. “My friends were calling me the next day,” he says, grinning. “Where are you? Let’s meet. I was like, yeah, let’s meet by 8. I’m going to the hostel to change.” He never met them because he fell asleep the second he stepped into his room.
The degree made all of it possible. When a full-stack internship came up in Mumbai, he went, and kept studying. When the TA position for MAD-2 brought him back to campus, he came.
“You can take any opportunity,” he says. “You can go wherever you want in the whole of India. Your degree will not stop.”
For someone who’d watched friends in on-campus degrees navigate attendance requirements and fixed schedules, that freedom was never something he took for granted.
Darshan is graduating in December, 2026, and he’s honest about not knowing what comes next. Higher education, maybe. The industry first, then masters, or maybe just the industry. “Both doors are open for me,” he says. “I’m figuring it out.” For someone who went all in at 17 with no backup plan, the uncertainty sits easy on him. He’s been making it up as he goes since the beginning, and it hasn’t let him down yet.
– written by Nikita Nanduri
