My Journey through Engineering

A journey of someone who might inspire you to start hustling!

5 min readSep 4, 2019

Engineering is not as straightforward as it seems. It has its ups and downs and trust me unless and until you have experienced it you haven’t seen it! This blog is a short story of my engineering adventure which took place in the last 3 years and how it has changed me!

After 12th it was a difficult choice for me, which branch should I take up for Engineering. And the pain of not getting into an IIT was also there. A lot of my seniors, teachers, and professionals suggested I should take up a core branch such as Electronics and Telecommunication, Electronics, etc over Information Technology.

From a small age, I had an inclination towards computers, so I knew this is the one for me. It was a big risk at that time, but it certainly did pay off!

I landed in Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute-Mumbai (VJTI) as Information Technology as my majors. For those who don’t know it is one of the oldest engineering colleges in Mumbai and India. It was difficult to get familiar with a new lifestyle and a new city. People here were full of knowledge and way smarter than me. From day 1 I had an Inferiority Complex, but yes there were positive sides also. My seniors helped me a lot in almost everything.

The thing about second-tier, third-tier, and lower engineering colleges in India is that you can not expect much from the college when it comes to knowledge. VJTI is way better though it has given me a lot of opportunities. So a lot of learning had to be self-learning through YouTube, Coursera, and other online platforms. Getting a good professor is a real luxury. But it has its pros also you learn a lot more than just the bookish knowledge. Anyways VJTI is at par with most NIT level colleges and the exposure is really good.

Another important part of this journey were various student clubs and festivals. For me Technovanza-Technical festival of my college and Community of Coders(COC) was life-changing. Technovanza helped me grow as a person, tackle challenges, and most importantly get stuff done! Whereas COC was like an elder brother to me guiding me on every step. Be it the first code that I had written or the Internship at Amazon COC was there for me.

The Coding Train!

I started coding in my freshman year but it was very basic. I made a shape optimization project using Python. I started getting real exposure when I was in the second year. I deeper study of Python, Java, and Database was done. This was the period I got into Competitive Coding. I used to code at least 3–4 questions on either of hackerrank, HackerEarth, CodeChef, or geeks for geeks. But majorly I practiced on hackerrank.com. I’m not an expert at it, but trust me practice does help. And over time my coding skills improved.

Companies come in the third year to offer 2 months summer internship. A lot of my friends took up an internship after the second year in various startups, but I preferred prepping for the internships to be offered via college. Even though I didn’t study much in my summer I got shortlisted for Morgan Stanley, it was the first company to come to our campus and one of the best too. I felt couldn’t crack it but I did!

That day I learned an important lesson

Never, ever underestimate yourself!

If you put in enough efforts you can crack any company! And as expected I got rejected in Morgan Stanley and I realized if I had prepared properly I could have cracked it. But what’s gone is gone. Next was Samsung, I had high hopes from Samsung. But, fate and had something else for me, Samsung changed their interview pattern at the last moment. And I screwed up in the interview, I was devasted I literally cried after the interview.

A for Amazon!

A day later Amazon mailed that it will be coming for interns after 10–12 days. I took a day as a break and exactly on 15th August 2018 I started preparing with full swing. I used to study for 10 hours a day. Coding about 30–40 questions daily. I have not studied with that level of dedication in my whole life.

The D-Day was here, I cracked the coding round, 19 people were shortlisted for interview. The interviews were surprising as the questions asked were a lot easier than expected. And after 20 hours, the placement office mailed us the results. I along with 6 other students were shortlisted for the Summer Internship. That was one of the happiest days of my life. I had never even dreamt of getting into the big four tech companies.

This is one big turning point in my journey. I got into the development side. Blockchain caught my eye and I started studying it even it was not in our curriculum. Cryptography was another subject which I liked a lot and then I started to develop my interests in Machine Learning. I got selected in the Blockchain and AI team of my college.

My internship at Amazon was really life-changing and taught me a lot of things. I shall give a detailed experience of my internship in another blog. A few days back I got the Pre Placement Offer from Amazon. So now I’m in my final year of engineering. Unfortunately, I took LinkedIn seriously just a few days back. A suggestion to all the new techies out there LinkedIn is a very powerful tool to connect with like-minded peoples, seeking job/internship opportunities. It also shows what other people are doing while you are wasting time on Instagram and snap chat. No offense but this is the harsh reality. There are uncountable opportunities and infinite things to do.

Some programs that I’ll suggest are: