BS (Data Science)
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 distance, and dedicated his career to helping others reach it. Then COVID-19 arrived, disrupting the chalk-and-board world he had built his career in and forcing him to rethink his future.. Suddenly, everything was online. Technology wasn’t a convenience anymore; it was the infrastructure of survival. He watched the world around him adapt in ways that his blackboard couldn’t follow.
A friend told him about the IITM BS Degree in Data Science and Applications. “The degree gave me the right pathway,” he says. And then, with a smile: “It made me feel like a child again.”
That feeling, it turns out, was exactly what he needed. For years, Chandan had been teaching students how to think about Physics – breaking down complex concepts, making the abstract tangible, holding the attention of teenagers with one eye on the clock and the other on the JEE. He was good at it. But something shifted when he found himself on the receiving end of the same process.
The IIT Madras faculty, he noticed, had a particular way of doing things. A 12-week course. Thirty-minute lectures that somehow covered ground other institutions stretched across entire semesters. Not because corners were being cut, but because the content was designed and structured with a precision and intentionality that Chandan, as a teacher himself, couldn’t help but study.
“Being a learner taught me how to teach better.”
He came back to his JEE students differently. His classes started to have better examples. His presentations found a new clarity. The flow he’d always been chasing, that elusive quality where a concept doesn’t just land but sticks. He started to show up more reliably. The students he was preparing for IIT were, without knowing it, benefiting from the fact that their teacher had gone and sat in one.
There’s something poetic about that loop. A man who spent his career trying to get students into IITs, finally finding himself in the same ecosystem, learning from the same faculty who had trained generations of Engineers and Scientists, discovering that the education changed not just what he knew, but how he thought. He also appreciated something less glamorous, but perhaps more honest: the real human interaction the program offered. The TAs weren’t chatbots. When you had a question, someone actually engaged with it. The industry exposure gave context to theory. For a person who had always believed that good teaching means meeting students where they are, this felt like a program built by people who believed the same.
Chandan’s next chapter involves exploring AI integration in Physics education. A natural convergence of the two worlds he now inhabits. When asked what he’d say to someone considering the degree, he didn’t reach for inspiration. He reached for honesty. “It’s a privilege, use it wisely.
Choose courses that actually matter to you, and don’t run behind the hype.”
Coming from a man who once studied from 10 PM to 5 AM to keep pace with students half his age, that advice carries a particular weight. He isn’t telling you it will be easy. He’s telling you it will be worth it, if you show up for the right reasons.
– written by Elsa Prasad
