BS (Data Science)
Forty years ago, Mr. M. Nagrajan sat at a desk without a monitor or a keyboard in sight. He was writing code not with a blinking cursor, but with a pen in a physical notebook. Lines of COBOL, Fortran, and Pascal were meticulously hand-inked, then mailed to a college in Madurai for evaluation. There was no “run” button to check for syntax errors; there was only waiting for a postman to return with his marks. Today, at 60, that same ink-stained discipline has brought him to the cutting edge of Artificial Intelligence. Nagrajan is a veteran Chartered Accountant with over three decades of experience at the complex intersection of commerce and computer systems.
He stumbled upon the IIT Madras BS Degree in Data intersection of commerce and computer systems. He stumbled upon the IIT Madras BS Degree in Data Science and Applications while browsing NPTEL’s structured lecture archives, searching for a way to move from analyzing the past to predicting the future. He came for the course. He stayed for something he hadn’t expected to find at 60.
His return to academia is defined by a routine that mirrors the intensity of his earliest days as a student. Weekly graded assignments, mandatory quizzes, and high-stakes Online Proctored Programming Exams (OPPEs) keep him, in his own words, “on his toes.” He simply doesn’t watch a lecture once and move on – he revisits them repeatedly, finding a flutter of fresh insight with every viewing. To Nagrajan, the BS degree isn’t merely a course; it’s a cult of rigor that holds its own against global institutions like MIT or Stanford. The student honor code, the deadlines – he embraces all of it; forty years into a professional life that could have excused him from every bit of it.
The most profound obstacle he faced wasn’t a difficult algorithm or an unfamiliar programming paradigm. It was something far more seductive: the lure of a comfortable exit.
With a healthy “egg nest”, a lifetime of savings, and a calendar already pencilled in with yoga sessions and classical music evenings, Nagrajan stood at the threshold of full retirement. Every conventional signal said it was time to wind down. But the “coder’s high,” as he calls it, proved too addictive to abandon. He chose the thick and thin of AI consulting over the quiet of a retiree’s life. His reflection on this transition is characteristically precise:
“In evolution, what you really do is you not only progress but also morph into something different.”
For Nagrajan, simple advancement was never enough. Survival, in any field, demands transformation. And transform he has. He is no longer just a student – he is a TA for the DSAI lab course, guiding teams of five through the creation of original AI applications hosted on GitHub. He spends his days mentoring students, helping them navigate placement interviews, sharpen their group discussion instincts, and find their footing in an industry he has watched evolve from punch cards to neural networks.
As he approaches his final two courses, his gaze is fixed entirely forward. He plans to spend the next fifteen years giving back to the IIT Madras community – teaching, mentoring, building. For M. Nagrajan, the post-mortem phase of life isn’t approaching. It is not even present in his calendar.
– written by Elsa Prasad
