I studied at a primary school in my village.
I have a small family and we never really had much, to begin with. All we had was the courage to dream. Despite being born and brought up in a village, my parents never let us limit our capacity to have bigger dreams with a much more luxurious life than they could give us. Soon after my primary school ended, my parents took me to the city of Chikhli to complete my schooling.
I wasn’t interested in Computer Science engineering from the beginning. I had just heard about it from my father. He told me that he found computer science interesting. From his motivation and my acquired interest in computers, I gained the confidence to become an engineer.
I was grateful that I got admitted to L. D. Engineering College which is Gujarat’s first government engineering college. With my hard work and resilience, I scored good grades and saw my parents swell up with pride when I started attending college. It was almost as if they let out a huge sigh of relief and they knew at that moment that things will be alright from then on.
I studied as an I.T. Engineer during my bachelor’s degree. I continued my studies and obtained a masters’ degree in the same field. I also did some research work for ISRO where I learned a lot from the great scientists of our country. My research there was based on the extraction of carbon dioxide from an image. I remember working under the rigorous guidance of Ms Chaurasia and creating algorithms. It was a challenging period of around nine months because I had to relearn a lot of concepts from physics.
After working at ISRO, I worked for two years. I joined a company named Uffizio as a junior software engineer. I spent 2 years working there but soon after, it began feeling stagnant. I was told by some friends that Data Structure is a primary need for software engineers, so I was suggested a skill-improvement course. Some of my friends took an aptitude test for this course. I, along with another friend, got selected for this course. This is how I joined Scaler.
I enjoyed the comprehensive teaching sessions in the classroom. My mentor, Rishabh Tiwari and Debagnik Gosh, who was from Amazon, helped me and guided me a lot because I thought my communication skills fell short during interviews. I have always been a hardworking person so I used to devote two to three hours every day to studying and preparing for interviews. I put in double the amount of hours on weekends because I knew that I had a long way to go.I am extremely appreciative of my teachers Riya Bansal, Tarun Malhotra, and Kshitij sir. They possess deep knowledge of the topics they teach. I am in awe of them because of how they used to cooperate with all the students on their individual quirks and problems and worked with them and honed their specific skills. They taught me that as an engineer, your main problem isn’t communication. You must be able to solve problems. The mock interviews helped me solve problems with efficiency.
My family background is completely different from my field. We don’t have any Computer Science engineers in the family. I thought that I won’t be able to communicate properly during the interviews at all. Even during college placements, I knew that my communication skills affected my chances of getting placed in a good company through my college’s placement cell.
But, my teachers gave me confidence, and I finally did it! Now, I can see the huge difference in terms of the knowledge I have gained and the offers I have got. Thanks to Scaler I am working at Microsoft as a Software engineer. What matters is your hard work and consistency. Consistency is key and it brought me, a person who came from a village school, to Microsoft and maybe even beyond. There is no shortcut to success. Work hard on what you want to be. That’s it.
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