Success usually arrives in milestones: an examination cleared, a rank secured, a degree completed. For Prashasti Sarraf, it appears instead as a habit, repeated so consistently that individual achievements begin to lose their ability to surprise. ICSE AIR 5. ISC AIR 7. St. Stephen’s College. IIT Madras BS Degree. Academic distinctions, TA roles, research initiatives…
The passion for a subject is oftentimes the key to open doors to a broader world, and Sarath Sai knew exactly that. From being unable to take Aerospace Engineering due to eligibility criteria to falling back on a Bachelor’s Degree in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in his home-state of Andhra Pradesh at JNTU, he…
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…
Everyone has felt the suffocation of being stuck in the cyclical routine of 9 to 5, how it clips one’s wings and relegates them to mindless tasks. Prachi Trivedi found herself at the edge of entering such a world and could only imagine the color that would be lost should she choose such a route….
The race of entrance examinations hypnotizes all into a rush of academic mania, however, Sayan Ghosh asked the question many omit. Why is it necessary for someone to hone their problem solving skills through Physics and Chemistry while pursuing Computer Science? With the allure of computer games and his fascination for the grandeur and social…
In Sanskrit, there is a word “jijñāsā” , which lives on in Hindi and Bengali as “jigyāsā” and “jiggāśā” : a restless desire to know, a curiosity so deep that English has no perfect equivalent. Priyangshu Bala might not have used that word to describe himself when he enrolled in the IIT Madras BS Degree…
Chandan Kumar spent years on the other side of the classroom – chalk in hand, explaining the elegance of Physics to students preparing to crack one of the world’s most gruelling entrance exams. His goal, every single day, was to get his students into an IIT. He knew the institution well, admired it from a…
The monotonicity of college life, the hours of vacancy and a mind rushing with ideas is a cocktail for thirst; The thirst for more information, for knowledge and depth that Prahladh C sought in the comfortable afternoons after attending PMS college in Bangalore while pursuing AI and ML. Having missed the chance to attend high…
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…
There is a version of Piush Das’s story on paper that looks like a series of wrong turns. A Humanities student who avoided Mathematics. A college dropout. Someone who spent years studying alone at home, far from any campus. By most conventional measures, this is not the profile of someone who becomes a Teaching Assistant…