My Journey

TL; DR: If you are like me, running away from long text passages please feel free to jump to timeline view 😉
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I joined engineering by choice of my parents, and of course, it had a lot to do with me not knowing what to do. I was sure I couldn't stand blood, so becoming a doctor was out of the equation. Naturally, I was asked to write a common entrance exam and stumbled upon getting a good rank. I then surfed through colleges and dealt with the stressful process of seat allotment in physical premises--unlike today's online allocation--which was nothing short of an adventure ride.

Thus, I embarked on becoming an engineer, along with ~2M other students. I knew that I wasn't meant for engineering; I was terrible at computer science. My brand as a student was 'that guy who dances well and organizes flash mobs.' But in my third year, I ended up taking a JAVA-J2EE course at NIIT, and that's where my love story with technology and coding began! I was in awe of how interesting coding can be, especially UI/frontend development--'you can see things happening on-screen.' The kid in me was jumping out of joy when I learned the (:hover) attribute in CSS 😜

With all the learning and guidance I've received from some amazing teachers in my life, I landed my first job as a software engineer at Microsoft. The next few years were filled with learning, coding, travel to the USA, the MACH Program (Microsoft Academy of Campus Hires), office parties, colleagues turned friends for life, stress, depression, identity issues, coming out as a queer person, leading an Employee Resource Group, and more. These are things I'll mention in my book someday 😜. Now, I'm heading towards the next chapter of my career as a Product Manager.

My love for building great user-centric products led me to the discovery of my passion for PM-ing. What started as a quest to know what's next landed me in a role managing a few internal HR applications, to building scalable engineering systems for office web applications.

Now that you've made it this far, let's take a moment to appreciate 'you'! I plan to keep adding paragraphs above this until I reach the point of writing a book (but will anyone read it?). This is a question for the future 😊.

If you want to continue this conversation, feel free to drop by during my open office hours.
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