BS (Data Science)
At 48, Kaushik V had everything a domain consultant could want: two decades in FinTech, a CA qualification, and the respect of industry peers. But more often than not he found himself sitting in meetings, watching technical teams build products he couldn’t fully understand. He was an expert in business, but struggled in technology.
“I often felt I wasn’t empowered to support our technical teams to the full extent of my potential” he said quietly. He had spent twenty years standing between clients and engineers, but the translation was mostly unidirectional.
So during covid, when the world was quietly shutting down, Kaushik did something unexpected and enrolled as a first-batch student in the IITM BS Degree in Data Science and Applications.
The first shock came immediately, when foundation Mathematics demanded everything from him. He hadn’t opened a Math textbook since his 12th-grade exams, roughly 30 years prior. Graph theory. Calculus. Linear algebra. “I was wondering, what did I get myself into?” he remembered with slight traces of that panic. But something shifted when he refused to stay helpless and went beyond just watching lectures. He put in deliberate, focused efforts to rebuild his basics from scratch. The end-result? He became one of the toppers in the Math-2 course!
The path from struggling to excelling wasn’t linear. There were blurred late nights, puzzling concepts, and study groups that led to real collaboration. He found unexpected value in his younger peers, whose tangential thinking often provided the breakthrough needed to solve problems he had struggled with for days. “It’s always good to learn from younger people. They think very differently, they think more freely,” he reflected. “With my age, I tend to think this is how I should look at it. But then they come up with some unconventional way of thinking. It just gives you a lot of understanding.”
Beyond everything, for Kaushik, this program wasn’t merely about programming or data science. It was about learning itself; how to learn, how to unlearn, how to sit with discomfort and push through it.
“Do a little bit every day, because that’s how the brain works, it builds those neural connections over time.” he said, and the simplicity of it masked something profound.
Kaushik, like thousands of other BS students, found himself swept up in Paradox’s energy. The fest where thousands gathered; professors became rock stars with selfie lines; hackathons ran late into the night. He made friends across decades and disciplines, sat among 4,000 other online learners who were real, hungry, and unwilling to settle.
By December 2024, Kaushik finished his degree with a CGPA of 9.69. But grades weren’t the point anymore. “I’m not doing this degree to get a job. I’m doing this degree to learn,” he said, and it sounded like wisdom most people never find.
Now he talks about “learning to learn” as the real skill – not frameworks or libraries that come and go like fashion, but understanding the underlying architecture. Understanding why things are built the way they are. One doesn’t learn to code anymore, one learns to think.
Kaushik aims to build an AI-first FinTech product, with a wish to be a student forever.
What the BS program gave Kaushik couldn’t be measured by a degree. It was an opportunity to restart, an opportunity to be a beginner again, an opportunity to rebuild his foundation, and this time, really understand it.
In a world where the second act is often about climbing higher, Kaushik is building something meaningful, and he has learned how to learn – just in time to use it.
– written by Nehansh Kesharwani
