As a young professional, there are several harsh realities you have to come to terms with before you can actually start a successful career. All of us have had those frustrating moments where we’ve known we’re capable of more but the system doesn’t believe it. My story is similar but I managed to know exactly when it was time to overcome the system and show my true potential!
My early life was as average as it gets. I was born and brought up in a lower middle class family in the vivid city of Kolkata where I completed my schooling from the local State board school. During my schooling years, one of my teachers introduced me to computer science, and even though I couldn’t understand most of it, I was wildly fascinated by the green text and the quick keyboard taps. I was hooked.
That’s when I decided that I wanted to pursue engineering with CS as my stream. My college was a semi government college, and that meant that placement opportunities were going to be pretty bland. I knew this when I enrolled myself so I can’t really say I was surprised. In 2019, I graduated with a B.Tech degree in my hand and got a job in TCS through their All India campus placement programme and moved to Bangalore for work. Having your first job at a service-based company has its pros and cons. The cons usually outweighed the pros in my case.
TCS being the ‘mass recruiters’ of India basically labelled me more of a liability than an employee. Whenever I would apply to well-known companies, I would barely get the chance to put forward my skill sets before I was turned away at the door.
Even though I was a talented engineer, it was frustrating for me to continue to work a job that led me to work on uninteresting and outdated projects. It got worse when I requested my manager to shift me to a different project where my resources were not being wasted on something that could be done by a much less experienced professional. It really demotivated me to learn that this was the project I would be working on for 3 more months which was also when I decided to quit.I started to apply to product-based companies, only to realise that my skills were nowhere near enough to crack their interviews. After talking to a couple of friends, I was introduced to Scaler Academy, and since I had nothing to lose, in April 2020, I decided to enrol myself.
I will be completely honest: it was one of the best decisions I have ever made. Scaler’s teachers are actually some of the most well-known people working in FAANG companies, so I never once felt that I was being guided in the wrong direction.
What struck me more than the curriculum was the incredible feeling of community in the institute. Not just during the time I was preparing and improving my programming skills, but even today I am welcome there to ask about life advice or work related questions. They helped me solve 10 DSA questions everyday for a year, which is quite impressive from a developer’s point of view. The teachers became my friends and they shaped me to be the person I am today. Who receives that from an online coding course?
In fact, I want to specifically mention one of my teachers, Kshitij sir, who helped me massively during that time. Abhishek sir was also one of the most helpful teachers I have come across in my life. Even while working at Amazon during that time, he made sure to take time out of his day and clear my doubts whenever I needed him.
After I left Scaler, I felt confident about my journey into the world of job hunting again, and my confidence was further strengthened when I started receiving calls from top companies. It finally felt like I was living up to the potential I was made for. In the end, it was the consistency to the curriculum that gave me the edge over my competitors. The only way to go now is to carry this edge and excel in the field I was born to be successful in!
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