BS (Data Science)
Every student joins the IIT Madras BS Degree convinced they can take on just a little more. Four subjects? Manageable. An internship alongside coursework? Why not? Aditya Sharma thought the same. Foundation, though, had other ideas. At the time, juggling four courses alongside his Metallurgical Engineering degree at IIT BHU was anything but easy. Looking back, Aditya sees it as his first lesson in the programme: flexibility does not create extra hours in the day. It simply gives you more choices about how to use them. Curiously, Data Science was never a backup plan for Aditya.
Even before starting his undergraduate degree, he knew he wanted to build a career in software. So when he came across an advertisement for the IIT Madras BS Degree in Data Science and Applications, he didn’t spend weeks weighing the pros and cons. “I just went with my gut feeling,” he recalls. It turned out to be one of the better instincts he trusted.
The programme, however, has a way of correcting overconfidence. After the infamous four-subject semester, Aditya stopped treating every term like a race. He reduced the course load. Internship coming up? Plan around it. Even a course he assumed would be straightforward, Market Research, ended up humbling him enough to retake it, simply because he believed he could do better.
Somewhere along the way, he realised that learning wasn’t about squeezing more into a semester; it was about making enough room to actually understand it.
That lesson became even more valuable outside the classroom.
One of Aditya’s biggest disappointments came when he missed out on Google Summer of Code – an opportunity he later admitted he had not prepared for seriously enough. Determined not to repeat that mistake, he approached the Summer of Bitcoin applications with far greater intent. This time, the opportunity opened several doors: he earned a return offer for future cohorts, received multiple grants to contribute to open-source projects on the Lightning Network, and was eventually invited to speak at the Bitcoin Conference in Nashville. More importantly, working alongside developers exposed him to a world beyond internships and sparked a growing interest in research. That interest eventually led to an admission offer from the Technical University of Munich, known for its strength in science, engineering and technology.
In hindsight, Aditya believes the biggest advantage of the programme wasn’t an internship or a placement, it was the way it built the fundamentals from the ground up.
The programme, he says, starts from first principles, making even complex subjects approachable.
Courses such as Computer Networks and Computer Architecture later proved directly useful in his open-source work. What began as coursework became knowledge he could carry beyond the classroom.
It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that Aditya’s advice to juniors runs against the grain. At a time when many students start chasing internships from day one, he suggests something less glamorous: spend your first year becoming a good student. Build your fundamentals, learn how to learn, and let the opportunities follow.
Looking back, Aditya’s journey is less a story of avoiding bad decisions than learning from them. The four-subject semester, the missed opportunity, the retaken course – each pushed him to rethink how he approached learning and opportunity. In the end, four subjects wasn’t a bad decision. Believing he wouldn’t learn anything from them was.
~written by Shambhavi Shekhar
