BS (Data Science)
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 mind.
It started, like most things in Aaruni’s life, by accident. His BCA university had stopped taking exams during COVID, and with time on his hands and no clear path forward, he found himself reading about a new degree from IIT Madras.
The degree’s structure made that step easier than it might have been. No attendance requirements, no uprooting his life, no leaving Raipur. He could study from home, on his own schedule, without the financial weight of relocating or paying residential fees. For someone who wasn’t yet certain this was the right path, that flexibility wasn’t just convenient – it was the thing that made trying feel low-risk enough to actually do.
And when the results came in and the merit scholarship followed, covering a significant portion of his fees, the degree stopped feeling like a tentative experiment and started feeling like something worth betting on.
What he didn’t expect was what came next. Somewhere in the early weeks of preparing for the qualifier, he stumbled upon a Telegram group full of strangers doing the same thing. He wasn’t particularly serious at first, but the people in that group were, and their motivation had a way of becoming contagious. When they finally sat the qualifier, every single one of them passed.
He describes what happened next as a chain reaction. One friend leads to another, that friend leads to three more, and before long you have a network that spans the entire degree and well beyond it.
The Telegram group became the foundation, but it didn’t stay small. It was that expanding circle of people that eventually led him to Paradox 2022 – and Paradox 2022, he’ll tell you, was something else entirely. “If you missed it, you missed it,” he says simply.
Crucially, it taught him that Mathematics didn’t have to be something he feared. He came in scared, and the degree didn’t let him stay that way. Maths 1, Maths 2, Machine Learning Foundations, Machine Learning Techniques, Deep Learning – each course asked something of him, and each time he gave it. “It has eliminated my fear of maths to a certain degree,” he says. “I still struggle with statistics, but the maths part – now I’m okay with doing it.”
That, more than anything, is what the IIT Madras BS Degree gave Aaruni Kale. Not a dramatic reinvention, not a headline-worthy pivot – just the slow accumulation of years of showing up. A fear that loosened its grip. A scholarship that told him early on that his effort was being seen. A brochure he read with one eye closed and a decision he made without much conviction, that turned out to be one of the better ones he’s made. He’s one term away from finishing now. Mathematics doesn’t scare him the way it used to. And the friends from that first Telegram group – the ones who all qualified together – are still around.
– written by Nikita Nanduri
