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. Nagarajan 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…
The email sitting in Sakthivel’s drafts folder was a long shot and he knew it. Zoho was a real company, a good one, and he wasn’t entirely sure his resume was worth sending. But he sent it anyway, and within two to three weeks, he was shortlisted. A week after that, HR called, and within…
In the classic film The Karate Kid, young Daniel LaRusso is famously frustrated by the mundane tasks assigned by his mentor, Mr. Miyagi. Waxing cars and painting fences seemed worlds apart from the martial arts mastery he craved. In much the same way, when Rajat Goel enrolled in the IITM BS in Data Science and…
Aaruni Kale is one term away from finishing his BS Degree in Data Science and Applications at IIT Madras. He joined the degree standalone, straight out of a BCA he dropped out of when COVID shut his university down. Scared of Mathematics, he was skeptical about the qualifier until a group of strangers changed his…
Currently, 21-years old Darshan Ganatra is living on the IIT Madras campus, where he is a teaching assistant for the MAD-2 course. He is attending offline classes alongside students from the main programme, and also finishing the last stretch of his BS. It started, as most good things in his life seem to, almost by…
Gurneet Kaur Bhullar had a habit of cutting it close. She missed the first IITM application window by a single day. Instead of scrambling for the next term, she waited. She watched videos, read student feedback, and decided she’d apply only if the reviews were good. It turned out to be one of the smarter…