BS (Data Science)
Most of us have spent at least a small part of our childhood captivated by a video game. We remember the thrill of clearing a level, discovering a hidden path, or trying again after failing for the tenth time. Bharat Mahindra, however, grew up wondering what it takes to build those worlds. Most of us have spent at least a small part of our childhood captivated by a video game. We remember the thrill of clearing a level, discovering a hidden path, or trying again after failing for the tenth time. Bharat Mahindra, however, grew up wondering what it takes to build those worlds.
That childhood fascination eventually led to a career in the Gaming Industry. For several years, he worked across Game Design and Graphic Design, turning a hobby into a profession. It was work he genuinely enjoyed, and for a while, it seemed like he had found the path he wanted to stay on. Life, however, has a habit of introducing new interests before old ones have fully run their course.
After returning to Delhi, Bharat stepped away from gaming to build a business focused on clean-air engineering solutions for hospitals. Around the same time, he began exploring Python, automation, and machine learning through online courses, trying to understand the technologies reshaping industries around him. The learning was exciting but it also revealed its limitations.
“They get your hands dirty,” he says, referring to the short online courses, “but they don’t really help you become a serious candidate.”
A mentor offered a simple piece of advice: if he wanted to build a long-term career in technology, he should look towards a recognised degree from an institution known for academic excellence. Around the same time, the IIT Madras BS Degree in Data Science and Applications had just opened admissions. The timing could hardly have been better. Looking back, Bharat doesn’t describe the degree as a career change. He describes it as a career correction.
“The degree absolutely switched my life back into tech,” he says.
“Game Design taught me how users think. Entrepreneurship taught me how businesses work. The BS Degree gave me the analytical thinking to bring those together.”
That combination eventually led him into Product Management, where all three perspectives became equally valuable. Today, he works as a Product Manager in Gurugram, where analytics, user behaviour, experimentation, and product decisions have become part of his everyday work. The BS Degree didn’t simply teach him new technical skills; it gave direction to experiences that had once seemed entirely unrelated.
For someone who had spent years making measured career decisions, Bharat made one wonderfully familiar “student mistake” the moment he joined the programme: he believed he could comfortably manage four courses in a term. This optimism lasted only until the first few deadlines. It was only after juggling office deadlines with assignment deadlines that he discovered the smarter approach: balance one demanding subject with another. That gave him room to breathe. “I wasn’t racing to finish,” he says. “I was trying to make sure I actually learnt the material.” The goal wasn’t to complete the programme as quickly as possible. It was to complete it well.
Bharat’s experience also reflects the programme’s flexibility. In the same WhatsApp groups where students discuss assignments, he sees professionals balancing office deadlines, parents fitting coursework around family life, and learners progressing at their own pace.
Learning, he believes, doesn’t happen in isolation from life – it happens alongside it.
He laughs as he mentions an Excel sheet that maps out the next several years of his life. Completing the BS Degree. Continuing into the MTech. Balancing work alongside both. Every milestone already has its place because every experience has become part of a much larger plan.
Anyone who has ever completed a jigsaw puzzle knows the peculiar satisfaction of placing the final piece. The picture doesn’t change at that moment, it simply becomes complete. Looking back, Bharat sees his journey the same way. Game Design, Entrepreneurship, Data Science, and Product Management were never disconnected careers. The BS Degree was simply the piece that allowed the whole picture to make sense.
~written by Shambhavi Shekhar
