You can’t grow if you never wriggle out of your comfort zone. At every chance of taking up a challenge, I have preferred abandoning my comfort zone for it. It was because of this spirit that I have now gotten closer to my dreams.
I think during the graduation time, lack of guidance and mentorship slowed my progress. When I later received quality mentorship at Scaler, it helped me a lot. Because of this, after completing my course with Scaler, I decided to help other students to navigate through this field. By then, I had that kind of experience and expertise that could help others receive requisite guidance. Now, I am mentoring 4-5 students. I prefer mentoring students who began their journey at the bottom with an absolute dearth of guidance and opportunities like me. My goal is to help these students reach their potential and help them early on.
Circling back a little, I did my schooling from the ICSE board. In ICSE boards, we are introduced to CS in grade 7 and coding in grade 9. These early introductions to CS and coding helped me decide the field of my choice. After my schooling, I started with B.Tech from Galgotias University. There was no availability of any attractive internship opportunities during my graduation. We neither received any guidance from the faculty nor the seniors. I gained actual guidance when I started working at Cognizant after college. Apart from my first-hand experiences, I also used to hear my friends’ experiences who were placed at better companies. They would tell me about the kind of technology that they were working on or any interesting insights about the industry that they received. These were the things that I found very helpful.
I changed companies after 7-8 months and joined PowerSchool. PowerSchool was a US-based ed tech company and I got really good exposure there. I collaborated with various teams around the globe. But as I said, you can’t grow in your comfort zone. My role wasn’t challenging enough so I was again looking for a change. I interviewed with some really good companies like Goldman Sachs and a few others. But there was a common pattern of rejection that I noticed in every interview. I used to falter at the system designs’ round and I knew before moving ahead I needed to improve on this aspect.
Scaler Academy was an upcoming online coding platform back then and I joined it because they offered a postpaid plan. Just a few months into the course, I got an offer from Paytm money. The offer was quite attractive in terms of the technology and scale that they offered me to work upon. I worked there for a few months when something turned my world upside down. My mother got diagnosed with breast cancer and it was devastating. I knew my package wasn’t compatible with the kind of expenses that would come.
So I started interviewing again and got offers from Ola, Razorpay, Zeta, and Cleartrip. I joined Razorpay recently in September. The hike was unbelievable as it was almost 15-20 times my initial package before Scaler.
Another amazing thing was that I didn’t have to revise even a single concept before these interviews. That’s how well the concepts were taught by Scaler. People from Scaler helped me a lot in accentuating my place in this field. My mentor- Mr. Ravi Goyal from Amazon, guided me a lot. Even after the completion of the course, we have kept in touch and I contacted him recently to get his opinion on which offer I should accept.
Apart from this, even during my course, he helped me a lot. I was very motivated when I began the course and I used to spend 4-5 hours every day. But soon, the pandemic hit and I started procrastinating a lot. My practice dropped by around 30% when the pandemic began. That’s when my mentor and student success guides helped a lot. They started pushing me to get back on track. Then I began giving 6-7 hours to compensate for the previous lag. If I could squeeze out a few minutes from office hours, I would practice then as well.
Even though I didn’t receive much guidance in college, I did get the taste of individuality there. It was the first time that I had stepped out of my home, my comfort zone. Before college, I had never stepped out of my home, and being the only child, I was pampered quite a lot. Receiving such a kind of pampering and love makes you want to enjoy that comfort as long as you can. But it was important for me to experience the ground reality- how you survive individually, how you manage your budget, and household chores. I learned it all in my college.
Adequate guidance could have made a difference in college but I think it doesn’t count anymore as I have come a long way since then. From my side, the only lack of effort was due to procrastination which is why I think it's very important to keep a check on yourself so that you continue on the right track. Other people can help you in this process but the responsibility of not letting your efforts falter is yours and yours only!
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