The vibrating phone on the armrest by her side broke her slumber. She checked to find an unknown number on the screen. Why bother? She thought, after all it wasn’t the call she had been so eagerly waiting for. “Hello?” she inquired, deciding against her intuition to pick it up anyway. A familiar voice responded “Maa! I got the job at Microsoft!”. “Shivang?” asked the enlivened mother. “Haan Maa, sorry my phone’s battery died. The interview just got finished” replied the excited young man. “Well, it’s about time...” said the mother, looking up, as the clock on the wall beside her struck 9p.m. “…that your hard work and dedication of four years finally paid.”

How to achieve our true potential? What does it take to bring those dreams, we all had into reality? This isn’t a cheat sheet to securing a 37 lakh package at Microsoft. This is the journey of a fellow IETian who overcame overwhelming odds to achieve success. This is a story about an IETian who, just like many of us, unaware of his true calling as a freshman, used to hope to get an MBA admit, somehow after BTech. This is the story of last day Shivang Bansal spent at the college. Within this story is the code that abstracts the values he lives by and iterations of deliberate trials and errors that made him realise those values. The code, should you be able to extrapolate it, simply returns you the answer to the question – irrespective of your branch, year, or understanding – ‘What should you strive for in life’?

Chapter - 1

On 8th of June, forty-five days after the offer letter was handed to him, Shivang spent his last day at IET. The emotive winds blew especially strong for him that day. Every gust of wind shook the tree of memories and with it gushed down leaves of fascinating recollections. Imagine a standard C-Block room. A ten by six feet small room with a creaky table right by the door and a brown plastic chair with it. On one side lay a small bed with a white sheet with orange stripes on it. On the wall, the opposite side hung a large black poster that read –

“What is Engineering about?” and below it was written in bold yellow letters “It’s about Reverse Engineering your life”.

Staring at it on the sunny morning of 8th June, Shivang said out aloud “Indeed it has been!”.

As he developed an insatiable appetite for coding, in the summers after freshman year he started dreaming about a job at Google or Microsoft. The aim seemed too superficial, too vague, and too blunt to develop a plan on achieving it. He dug deeper into his thoughts, read articles about emerging technologies, their implications for the future and the kind of work people in those technologies end up doing. After reading numerous articles and endless hours of soul searching, he knew he wanted to be a Data Scientist. But to become one he needed a significant amount of experience and research skills under his belt. He broke down the task into achievable milestones and classified those milestones according to time required to achieve each. Once classified he knew what he ought to have accomplished by the end of his undergraduate, by the end of each year, by the end of each month of those years, and by the end of the weeks of the upcoming months. He broke down his goal right down to what he needed to achieve in a single day and focussed just on that day. He reverse engineered his dream; and through each passing day brought that dream closer to reality.

Chapter - 2

He picked up his phone to check the time and it was 10 a.m. already. There was a long farewell message from ‘Kshitij 1st Yr. ietwhiteboard’. This reminded him of the pleasant evening he spent a week ago at the garden in front of the Academic block with two members of the ietwhiteboard team. It was around 5:30 in evening that day, as they sat underneath the shadow of trees surrounding the garden discussing about the college, their experiences, the scorching heat! (how to forget), and their initiative ietwhiteboard. Shivang was told, that they wish to write an article on his inspiring journey to Microsoft, publish it and spread the word through their portal, because his juniors longed, and won't miss a chance to know. Amidst a series of questioning and Shivang's expressive answers, an intrigued Harsimar asked:

So how do we build our resume?

Shivang remembers telling them, the first thing is to understand what outshining resume looks like. Try inferring, by analyzing resume of prominent people and successful individuals, what attributes to a compelling resume. Your skills, your accomplishments, and internships (and what you did there), constitutes majority of your resume. He emphasized on the importance of internships – They don’t just embellish your profile; they mould your character. A perplexed Kshitij intervened:

But what about people who don’t have enough experience to even get an internship?

“Even I couldn’t secure an internship till my junior year” Shivang told them. Keep trying your best, but don’t bother yourself if you don’t get one – keep working on projects alongside. Projects along with your internships build your resume.

This puzzled Harsimar:

How do we work on projects if we don’t have sufficient knowledge?

“This is where most people get it wrong” Shivang replied “they spend too much time trying to gain ‘sufficient understanding’ and end up doing no projects at all. The ideal way of approaching this is to look up some really cool project idea (like what if one had a security/threat predicting program that could detect guns in the CCTV videos) and then learn the technologies pertaining to it on the go (Computer Vision in the given example).”

Chapter - 3

A grin sneaked by as he replied on ‘Fractal’: their WhatsApp group – “Affirmative! 3 pm at NLT”. He checked his watch, it was noon already and the sun was shining at its brightest as a grateful Shivang entered the academic building to thank everyone there who was a part of his journey at IET. He was well aware that despite moments of disagreement and contention, there were people who had always kept the best interest of students at their hearts. Faculty and administration that didn’t mind being stigmatized as evil while they fostered virtue and goodness at the college. People dedicated for the betterment of college and society; something Shivang felt strongly for.

‘Betterment of college and society’ – The guiding principle behind foundation and perpetuation of Fractal. An initiative started by Nishant Bansal (super senior of Shivang). Nishant being a visionary with a perspicacious mind, sensed the inherent qualities of a coder in Shivang, and advised him to give coding a try, in freshman year. Nishant was someone that acknowledged the necessity of a strong coding culture to galvanize serendipitous learning and collective growth at the college. At 3:05 pm Shivang entered a room full of people who shared this vision – the Fractal Team. He instantly sensed the exuberance in the room. “Here is a group of individuals who have the conviction to surround themselves with smart people”, thought Shivang; After all, “Birds of a feather do flock together”. “Fractal is more than a group that shares a love for coding – it’s about finding a group that shares your reasons for that love. We hope you will continue to help people realise this fundamental truth as we did” said Shivang on behalf of the graduating senior year members, as he concluded the hour and half long interactive session.

He checked his to-do list as he came out of NLT-102 at 4:45 pm. Next on that list was thanking everyone who had congratulated him on Facebook & LinkedIn. As he sat down right there and fired up his laptop, recollections of the time when he used to consider social networking sites as a medium of distraction started bubbling up. It took him a while to realise that the medium didn’t just had noise to offer, but an opportunity for networking and building connections. Shivang clenched this opportunity, and ever so slowly, by building up on every meagre association he conceived a network of people in his domain. And his painstaking efforts didn’t go in vain; it was due to a referral from a remote acquaintance on Facebook that he got an interview call from Microsoft.

Chapter - 4

His train was to depart Lucknow Junction at 11:30 pm. It was 6 in the evening when he came back to his room. All his stuff was already packed except for some books and notebooks. He looked around the room that already looked deserted as his prized possession caught the eye. In a desolated corner of the table, there sat a waist-high stack of notebooks marked “DS & Algo”. A three-foot high physical manifestation of

knowledge accumulated by Shivang. The culmination of intense hard work and exemplary perseverance. That pile of notebooks reminded him of times when surging ahead became too difficult, almost impossible, and yet his unwavering resolve for his goals endured. When others gave in, he went on; when others compromised with their dreams, he didn’t.

At 9 pm before turning the lights off Shivang glanced one last time through the entire room. He was looking for something, he was looking for any memories that might have slipped behind. Finding none, a gratified and content Shivang flipped the switch. He smiled as the beams of rays from the street light sneaked in from the broken window glass and illuminated the familiar spot on the room’s door. Dopamine rushed through his entire body as he was reminded of his guiding value. With a feeling of determination and resolution, he stepped out of Room No. – 304. As the door closed behind him, on the only illuminated part of the door in the darkroom, was written in big, bold, and capital letters…

                                          NEVER GIVE UP !