BS (Data Science)
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 a month of sending that email, he was onboarded. He still sounds a little surprised when he talks about it.
What was in that resume was more than he’d given himself credit for.
Sakthivel is an INSPIRE scholar, a distinction awarded to science stream students who finish in the top 1% of their Class 12 board exams. He is a merit awardee from the IIT Madras BS Degree in Data Science and Applications, having maintained a CGPA above 9 through his foundation and diploma levels. He mentored three courses – Maths 1, the MLP project for two terms, and System Commands – while simultaneously completing a BSc in Physics at an offline college.
He did all of this without leaving Madurai, while taking care of his family. The resume, it turns out, had plenty to say.
He cleared his BS Degree qualifier while still in Class 12, before he’d even finished school, keeping the result in his back pocket for when he was ready to enroll. When he finally did, his approach was straightforward and deliberate – identify every mistake made during the qualifier, and make sure none of them appeared again.
The degree rewarded that discipline. Mentoring came first – Maths 1, then the MLP project across two terms, then System Commands. Teaching something is a different kind of understanding than learning it, and the distinction showed. “My communication wasn’t this good before joining this degree,” he says.
“This degree has given me confidence and has made my communication much better.”
The connection to Zoho didn’t come from a job board. It came through the Industry Interaction Center, one of the degree’s industry-facing initiatives that puts students in front of companies looking specifically for the kind of skills the curriculum builds. He sent his resume through that channel on something close to a whim, to a company he respected and wasn’t sure would look twice. The IIC put him in the room, but what happened next was his.
He’s an ML engineer at Zoho now, sixty percent of his day is reading research papers — understanding them, breaking them down, asking whether their findings can be implemented, modified, pushed further. “Can you invent from those research?” he says. “Can you modify those products if possible? How would you modify them?” It’s genuinely intellectual work, and it requires the kind of foundational understanding that takes years to build.
He’ll tell you honestly that something got lost along the way. Two degrees, a job, and a mentoring role left very little room for anything else. No third place, he calls it – just home, offline college, and this degree, on repeat. Friends were the casualty, and he names that plainly.
His advice to anyone joining now carries the weight of that: focus on what matters, yes, but leave space for the people around you. It’s the one thing he’d do differently.
His offline degree finishes soon. When it does, the trainee role at Zoho moves to full time, and the BS degree wraps up shortly after. From the outside it looks like an arrival – credentials in order, career launched, path secured. But to Sakthivel, he is simply navigating the extraordinary aftermath of a resume he almost didn’t send.
– written by Nikita Nanduri
