During my JEE examination, I asked the invigilator how to type "@". I had seen it before but never needed to type it, and I did not know where it lived on a keyboard. That small moment said everything about where I was starting from.
I grew up in Solapur, in a household where the primary language was Kannada, in a town where English existed only in textbooks and nowhere else. My schooling was in a Kannada-medium government school through 10th standard, the only option available, and the one I made the most of. I scored 99.20% on those boards. Through 11th and 12th, I had no coaching, no structured guidance, and no one to tell me where I was going wrong. That 99.20% became 84.67%. In JEE, I scored 99.79th percentile in Mathematics and 24th percentile in Chemistry. Those two numbers sitting next to each other tell the exact story of what the absence of guidance costs.
The first semester was disorienting in ways I kept quiet. People around me had been coding for years, moved through English effortlessly, and carried a confidence in this world that I simply did not have yet. I learned to use a laptop from YouTube tutorials. I used to ask friends about the meaning of words that the teacher used while teaching. But still I managed to finish the first year at 9.58 and 9.81 CGPA in the first two semesters.
In my first year I joined SPJIMR Abhudaya, mentored juniors, and after Abhudaya also I made myself available to students navigating the same gaps I had. But at the end of that year I assessed myself honestly while I worked as a volunteer for many activities. I hadn't taken any leadership activities. So next year, with one week to Annual Day, I led the creation of the college annual report — 250 pages, data scattered across departments, a team of 10 to coordinate. The report shipped on time.
Then came the moment that changed me most. In April 2025, X company visited campus. I was one of only two second-year students to fully solve the DSA problem of OA round. I cleared the technical round. I was rejected by HR. My first reaction was that I was more capable than the person they chose — and I held that thought until I was honest enough to examine it. When I did, I saw the real problem. There is a difference between being capable and being suitable. I had walked into a corporate interview the way I approach an algorithm — precision, correctness, no understanding of what was actually being evaluated. I had not listened. I had not understood the room. And underneath it all was an assumption I had never named: that solving the hard question meant I deserved the outcome. It did not.
I spent the following months understanding that rather than defending myself from it. When Y company came in July, I was different, not technically, but in how I listened, how I carried myself, how I understood what the other person needed from the conversation. I received the offer. Later I applied for Alumni Relations Cell to grow up more professionally and I was selected for the position of outreach head for the batch of 2000. And I am also currently leading Reporting work for the SPARK (official college editorial).
What came next tested something different. In my 5th semester, my laptop got damaged. For the next four months I studied on my phone and borrowed a friend's laptop when he slept at night, while simultaneously running alumni outreach for SPIT's 2000 graduating batch as their 25th Reunion Lead. At the end of semester I completed four academic projects needed for semester work without my own laptop and got a GPA of 9.81. We achieved 88% outreach coverage of the 2000 batch and organised 2 reunions in December.
Three years at SPIT gave me perspective from every direction, seniors who showed me how to think, juniors who reminded me what a single conversation can do, alumni who showed me what the long arc looks like, faculty who gave me frameworks I would not have found alone. I came from a place where none of these networks existed. Building them, one uncomfortable room at a time, has been as much my education as anything I formally studied.
My GPA across five semesters sits between 9.58 and 9.89. But the person producing those numbers has not been consistent, he has been changing, semester by semester, in ways a transcript cannot show. The growth I am most proud of is the distance between someone who did not know where "@" lived on a keyboard, and someone who has learned, slowly and imperfectly, how to lead, how to listen, and how to keep going when the conditions are not what he would have chosen.
Supporting documents: Google Drive