Let me start by giving a brief introduction to myself. I am currently pursuing my master’s in CS from TU Berlin. I completed my first year of master’s from KTH which is one of the world’s top 100 universities. I have received the highest scholarship for my master’s degree. I worked at Red Hat for two years which is one of the biggest open source companies in the world. I was invited as a speaker at the Linux Vault conference, North Carolina. I have published articles for open source magazine and have presented/attended various conferences. I was ranked 10th in the entire university for CSE. No, this is not me bragging about myself but trying to catch your attention to read the remaining article:)
Like majority of the students today, I too opted to do bachelor’s in CSE just because everybody else was doing it. I did not particularly have any interests in CS. Infact if anything I was pretty bad with computers and technology and believed that girls cannot be as good as boys in CS. Once I entered Amrita the first year went by pretty quickly and I had learnt absolutely nothing new in CS. This is when I started panicking – How can I be a good engineer when I don’t know anything about computers?. But there was nothing that I could do, nobody to talk to, nowhere to learn and absolutely no guidance. While I was aimlessly wandering one of my friends told me about this new “FOSS club” she had recently joined and how she was learning a lot of new things here. They were giving a small talk so I too decided to attend the session. This is and will be one of the most important turning points in my life. I realized that FOSS club was exactly what I was looking for. I started attending FOSS club regularly and the initial few weeks were frustrating because I was supposed to google things and learn on my own!! I was not spoon-fed and had to learn on my own. But slowly I realized how easy it was to learn something new, how much material was available online. I started to depend less on others and more on myself. However within a month, most of my classmates had left and we were just very few students who would be regular (we were still one of the batches with the largest number of students:)).
I will give a brief description of what I did during my bachelor’s. Throughout the second year I was learning a lot of new things, participating in various contests. During my third year I started open source contribution (that later helped me land my job at Red Hat). Me along with few other students got interested in cyber security and participated in various CTF contests. I also started writing a few articles for open source magazines. My final year was focused a lot on applying for internships/job, building a good SOP, recommendation letters, applying for master’s, attending talks and conferences. I also focused a lot on my studies and tried my best to keep a good cpga. Though a good cgpa goes not guarantee knowledge, but in my opinion it does create a huge difference when it comes to applying for your master’s.
There were ofcourse numerous hurdles throughout the journey. The first hurdle was myself. Now even though I was very motivated and regularly attended FOSS club (during weekends, after exams, during semester break). I was sometimes not very productive. However the key is to be consistent, even though you are not very productive never drop out. It is just a phase, it will pass. Many of my friends/classmates would make fun of me for “studying” too much, label me as a nerd or try to distract me. However the key is to understand that you are responsible for your own life and irrespective of what others say or do you must follow your passion and keep learning. Failing to achieve – there was a duration of time when most of my friends were achieving a lot of their dreams and I was unable to achieve anything. The key is to believe in yourself, don’t get disheartened and continue working hard.
Finally I would like to mention two of my achievements that I truly treasure. Firstly I learnt to learn – I am no longer scared to learn anything on my own and do not need others to spoon feed me. Secondly I am confident with my skills and believe in myself. All these experiences formed a strong foundation for me and helped me grow. I had amazing seniors who guided me, I had amazing friends who motivated me to stay consistent and ofcourse I had the most amazing mentor Vipin Sir who believed in me when I was completely clueless.
sakshiii 