BS (Data Science)
Most stories begin with a decision. This one began with a leaflet. Someone pressed it into Aathi Sankar’s hand outside a JEE Advanced examination centre. It looked no different from the dozens of flyers routinely distributed to students. But he kept it. He knew little of Data Science then, harboured no five-year blueprint, no smouldering ambition waiting to be unleashed. He was simply curious, and the name etched upon that pamphlet “IIT Madras BS in Data Science & Programming”, carried enough gravity to be worth the wager.
He entered the world of Data Science and Machine Learning with virtually no prior exposure. Rather than retreat from the unfamiliar, he treated it as an invitation to learn.
“The ability to adapt to various environments and ever-increasing demand” is, in his own words, the degree’s most defining gift.
Few wear that adaptability as effortlessly as he does. Robert Frost once wrote of a road not taken, of standing where paths diverge and a traveller must choose. But some travellers refuse the premise entirely; they look at the fork in the road and, instead of mourning the path foregone, simply walk both. Aathi Sankar is one such traveller. Alongside the BS Degree, he remains a final-year Electronics and Communication Engineering student at SSN College of Engineering, Chennai. For the better part of four years, he has balanced the demands of two parallel academic journeys, moving between coursework, deadlines, and examinations with a consistency that leaves little room for idleness.
The BS Degree entered his life almost by accident, beginning as a productive use of otherwise unremarkable weekends. Yet what first appeared to be a casual undertaking gradually revealed itself as something far more consequential. Discipline settled into his routine, shaped his habits, and the degree refused to remain a mere side pursuit.
For many students, the weekend marks a brief pause from academic obligations. For Aathi, it became an extension of them. Week after week, while one degree paused, the other demanded attention. This commitment eventually led him to the IIT Madras Research Park, where he spent two months interning with the Computer Science department, contributing to the development of hardware accelerators for AI and Machine Learning applications. The project itself was of his own conception – a deliberate attempt to reconcile his twin academic pursuits, refusing to let Electronics and Data Science remain isolated domains.
Perhaps the most striking moment of the conversation came when the subject turned to Artificial Intelligence. Fittingly, for a student of Data Science, Aathi spoke with unusual candour about a pattern he has begun to notice among his peers: an increasing reliance on tools like ChatGPT that, over time, risks eroding the willingness to wrestle with difficult problems independently.
“Try to complete all your projects as much as possible from your own knowledge,” he says. “Refer to the docs, go to forums, Stack Overflow – just try to reduce the use of Generative AI.”
This is not a rejection of technology. AI can accelerate learning, but it cannot replace the habits forged through sustained effort. Use AI, Aathi suggests, but do not become dependent on it. The struggle is not an obstacle to learning; it is often the learning itself.
Robert Frost imagined a traveller standing before two diverging roads and choosing between them. Aathi Sankar’s story suggests another possibility: that some journeys are shaped not by the path we leave behind, but by the courage to walk both.
– written by Shambhavi Shekhar
