My decade in review: 2011–2021
It was December, and I was wrapping up the last quarter at work with a retrospective ceremony, albeit from home (thanks to the pandemic), where my team and I review the bygone year, appreciate the things which went well and acknowledge the things which could have gone better. Clearing my inbox, and checking the last to-do off my list for the year, I couldn’t help pay attention to the lyrics of one of my favorite songs playing in the background —
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun
These thoughts took me down memory lane, thinking about where I was ten years ago, what I was doing then, what I’ve done since, the people I’ve met, the friends I’ve kept — and made along the way, the memories I’ve gathered, the places I’ve been to and the things I’ve learnt. The last decade has seen me becoming eligible to vote, getting through college, doing research, moving halfway across the world for grad school, moving again to the other end of the country for work, learning, un-learning, changing jobs, picking up new sports, reading, traveling and more recently, getting married. It’s been quite a ride!
This write-up is an attempt to look back at, reflect upon and journal my experiences through these years — a retrospective, of sorts. This is going to be a relatively long blog. It might be a good idea to grab a cup of coffee and find a comfortable spot.
2011: Blissful ignorance
I had recently turned eighteen, and one of the first things I did was to pass my driver’s license test. I was (and continue to be) fond of cars. I still remember waiting eagerly for my license to arrive by mail. Finally, I was street-legal! I enjoyed driving around, and would often sneak out with the keys of my dad’s car to zip around our neighborhood in north Bangalore. I aspired to become the host of Top Gear one day, and review cars for a living.
This was also my first year of undergrad, a funny time (especially in India) when you’re simultaneously not old enough to go on a road-trip without your parents’ permission, but are expected to make career decisions which would determine the rest of your life’s trajectory. So, I went with the most popular choice which everyone seemed to be aspiring for, and took up Engineering. College, for me, was a whole new world. I made some great friends and thoroughly loved the new college life, especially after the preceding two forgettable years of pre-university. As an undergrad, I was now pocketing a princely sum of five hundred rupees (~$7) per month as allowance. This was good money then, since I didn’t really have to pay for anything essential by myself. I lived rent-free in my parents’ house (which is the norm in India), had the good old college bus for my commute, and mom packed delicious lunch every single day! I wanted to make the best of my time here, and by the end of first year at college, I was in the Student Council, the Editorial Committee, was pitching in for departmental activities, helped coordinate events for the college fest and thought Dennis Ritchie was God. I had also managed to bring together a small project group with a couple of my classmates (whom I ended up founding a startup with, after a few years. But, more on that later). We had started building out some fun toy projects in C & C++ during that summer.
2012: The Intern
As a fresher, I was in awe of some of my seniors and peers in college who seemed naturally talented in various areas. Lacking any such inherent talent, my second year was mostly geared towards figuring out what I really enjoyed doing, was somewhat good at, and trying to be better at those. I took a liking towards photography (starting off with a basic point & shoot camera) and shared my clicks on Facebook, which received a good amount of social media validation. I also started catching up on my football, which I had largely ignored after high school and made some good friends on the field. I taught myself Photoshop and Lightroom, and started designing posters for events at college. People appeared to like my work, and soon I had a growing clientele. Having had my share of embarrassing on-stage moments during high school, I joined Toastmasters, and the group not only helped me fine tune my rudimentary public speaking skills, but also was very influential in me taking a liking towards it. I started quizzing again, made friends with a couple of fellow quiz enthusiasts and participated in a bunch of collegiate quiz events throughout the year.
That summer, I had the opportunity to intern at a software company called Aditi Technologies. They had recently opened a new office in Coimbatore, and offered to let me intern with them for the summer. I had just recovered from a fractured leg and much to Amma’s displeasure, I was quite excited about the idea of going to an alien city, where I didn’t speak a word of the native tongue and somehow survive on my own for the duration of the internship. Looking back, I’m glad about this decision. I strongly believe these early experiences of trying to make sense of how a software company works, collaborating with colleagues, learning about coding conventions, version control and design patterns, following (or at least trying to follow) Agile practices allowed me to become acquainted and comfortable with working in engineering teams. On the other hand, being away from home for the first time for an extended period taught me useful lessons about living alone, managing money, cleaning up after myself, making new friends, and quickly picking up the bare essentials of a new language, all of which continue to help me today. Most importantly, this stint taught me to appreciate the smaller things such as having a comfortable bed to sleep in, hot food at the dinner table or just having family and friends around, which until then I might have taken for granted.
2013: No more a teenager
2013 was my favorite year of undergrad. I couldn’t have been happier to be back in namma Bengaluru after a hot summer in Kovai. Before classes resumed, I showed what I’d developed during the internship to my project group. Having been used to running mostly static programs on the CLI up until now, I remember collectively fantasizing about all the cool projects we’d be able to build with a GUI and a database. This was one of the early segues which started redirecting our discussions towards imaginary startup ideas, some of which are still in contention.
A few days after college resumed, I came across Pranav Mistry’s now famous TED talk. Ever since, I started jotting down ideas which I found interesting in a notebook (still alive as a Notion page). During this time, I found a flyer from the national Innovation and Entrepreneurship Development Centre of India, who were looking for ingenious startup ideas by students to fund. If they liked the pitch, they’d not only grant a seed fund, but also help incubate the startup. India had just then kicked off the Aadhar campaign (similar to SSN) in full swing, an initiative which aimed to provide every Indian resident a unique identity number linked to biometrics. It also helped that my group and I had enrolled for a cloud computing course that very semester. Bringing these two together, (and with some inspiration from Back to the Future II), my team and I pitched an idea for a fingerprint based payment system, and called it ‘iPay’. (For the record, this was in 2013 - much before Apple Pay). After a few weeks of developing a PoC, drafting and redrafting the deck, we made our pitch to the committee. About a month (of radio silence) later, we were finally told we were going to be one of the recipients of the seed fund for the year, and soon received a check for INR 100,000 (about $1,340) to build our prototype. We spent the next few days negotiating with hardware vendors in the by-lanes of S.P. Road (Indian version of the Shenzhen electronic market) for fingerprint scanners, GSM modules and repurposing used auxiliary parts. Looking back, this experience helped us see the value in Jugaad, and I carry it with me to this day, especially while building quick MVPs at my job.
Outside the classroom too, I enjoyed being busy and volunteered to pitch in with anything which came my way. In hindsight, this was one of the best decisions I made as it exposed me to a diverse band of experiences. I took on more responsibility within the Student Council, and was nominated to become the secretary. I was heading my department’s student body and pitched in with editing the yearbook. I also had the opportunity to travel to Pune to represent my college as the student ambassador at INK Live (in association with TED talks) held at the FLAME University. Until then, our fest had been organized on a much smaller scale and was largely limited to the city. That year, we brought together a dream team to organize the fest and aspired to take it national. We worked day in and day out for about three months to organize a huge fest, the biggest that part of the city had witnessed, so far — spanning across three days, attended by institutes across India. More importantly, we were able to bring credibility to our student council for being able to pull off an event of such scale and establish trust with sponsors and partners for future collegiate events, which have only continued to grow since then.
My group was mostly occupied for the rest of the semester with developing our project. Thanks to iPay, the four of us bagged internships at General Electric that summer and spent a lot of time (a couple of hours each way, switching between two city buses) commuting to reach the GE campus in Electronic City (far end of the city from where we lived). Though I used to leave home early in the morning, and return only by late evening, thanks to the company of friends, the daily commute was never a bore. In contrast, nowadays when I’m driving alone to/from work, I sometimes miss the company of my college buddies, the little joys of waiting for a bus, sharing an auto-rickshaw, the roadside snacks and the endless chatter!
Tired of lying in the sunshine, staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long, and there is time to kill today
2014: Last lap
And just like that, I was in my final year of undergrad. Having completed the development of iPay’s prototype, we were testing a few demos and the initial responses were very encouraging. On one of those days, I received an email from Unisys with an invitation for a Student Innovation Program. We went ahead with the initial process and were invited to participate in the qualifying rounds. After several rounds of grueling technical evaluations, report submissions, remote interviews and demos — which spanned across multiple weeks, we were selected as one of the five finalists from across the country, and were invited to present at (a Y-Combinator inspired) Demo Day. Eventually, we went on to win the national 2nd prize, out of 1,400 teams which had participated. We were over the moon!
We were covered by the local press the next day since we happened to be the only college from Bangalore in the finals. I remember receiving congratulatory calls from a few friends and family who recognized me in the newspaper pictures. Our celebrations didn’t last too long, though. We enjoyed a quick reception back in college before being sternly reminded about the fast approaching capstone submission’s deadline, finals, and campus interviews. Jolted back into reality, we again found ourselves desperately looking for a new project to work on. Fishing for ideas, we spoke to people around the campus asking them what would make their lives easier. During one such conversations, we found out that our college was looking for vendors to build web based tools to digitize their workflow. This was also meant to help with the annual accreditation process which was being enforced by the AICTE, which required all colleges to maintain and submit digital records such as attendance, grades, student feedback, faculty research, and the like, which being done manually, thus far. We convinced our department to let us work on solving this by building a barebones CRM application, as part of our capstone. In this direction, we built several functionalities such as an online feedback solution, which we hosted on our college’s servers, beta tested with our department, rolled it out to the whole college, and completed the entire anonymized feedback collection process (per AICTE guidelines) in about 3–4 days, as opposed to the the existing paper based system which took several weeks to implement and was prone to completeness and interpretability errors. Next, we ventured into hardware and built text messenger kits, complete with a GSM modem, which we manually installed in every department, that allowed faculty to automatically send text messages to an entire class’ parents/guardians with one click, notifying them of their kids’ attendance when it fell below a threshold (much to the disappointment of our juniors). We added incremental functionalities which we thought were cool, such as auto flagging sudden discrepancies in metrics’ trends, auto scheduler to create class/exam timetables without conflicts, dashboards, git integration for code submissions and a biometric attendance system (repurposed from iPay) for faculty — all of which gathered and stored data per the accreditation norms, so as to instantly generate periodic reports. This would potentially save a lot of time during the end of the academic year.
The department loved it and knowing other colleges could use something like this, encouraged us to spin it off as a startup. So, the four of us incorporated a startup in Bangalore and christened it Amigo Inc. It took about three months of running from pillar to post to get the company registered (without greasing any palms). We thought our startup would be the next unicorn and had even had thought of lofty titles for our imaginary business cards. Of course, I was going to be the CEO. We were due for a reality check soon!
Though the administrative folks at other institutes seemed to like our controlled demos, and a few city colleges were even on board to hand us all their data, pretty early on, we realized that we just weren’t ready to handle running the service at scale, managing infrastructure, handling security and downtime. In a few months, it was clear that we wouldn’t be able to give the startup enough time, since each of the team members were either preparing to start their first real job or begin grad school. So, we decided to pause our startup efforts for the time being and gain some real-world experience before giving entrepreneurship another shot.
I had an offer from a large tech company in Bangalore, but wasn’t sure if I wanted to take up a software engineering job right away, or pursue my master’s degree. Over the last few years, I had come to know an IAS officer, who encouraged me to take up the UPSC exams and even offered to guide me. Unisys had also reached out asking if I was interested in being a part of their summer internship program. Since I anyway had about three months to spare before my full-time job began, I joined their mobile R&D team as an intern. It was a fun team to work with and I got to learn a lot about cross platform mobile development with Apache Cordova plugins. In parallel, I had started preparing for UPSC exams in the evenings and began to realize how little I knew about my country and its affairs.
Just as I was wondering about what to do next during the last days of the internship, fortunately, a Research Assistant’s post opened up at the Dept. of Computational & Data Sciences (erstwhile SERC) at the Indian Institute of Science, the country’s premier research institute, and knew that this would be a great springboard for grad school. I applied, was promptly invited for an interview with the P.I., and was soon assigned as a research assistant on an Intel sponsored High Performance Computing (HPC) project. I had no idea this would be a pivotal career move.
During my time at IISc, though my imposter syndrome lasted for months, I found myself enjoying the R&D tasks, and this reinforced my decision to stay and progress in the engineering realm. I found the activities around the campus very conducive to building an affinity towards all things technical, which pushed me further towards pursuing an M.S. or a Ph.D. I had a very encouraging peer group here, and our lunch breaks and chai walks at IISc were filled with discussions about Universities, faculty, research happening at their labs, entrance exams, and the whole nine yards. One of the biggest perks of being at IISc was that I could audit any class and sit in on any of the guest lectures, which I took complete advantage of. This was an eye-opening experience for me to hear from some of the stalwarts in various fields from such close quarters. I always felt that they were paying me to just learn new things. Not only did I get to share the lab with some of the smartest minds on campus, but had a front row seat to the bleeding edge of research happening in the HPC field and could run experiments on India’s fastest supercomputer (at the time). While I had the opportunity to learn a good deal about about writing clean code, scalability and optimization, more importantly, this was also the place where I got my first experience of working with huge amounts of data and powerful compute together, which, in many ways, paved the way for me to take up Machine Learning and Data Science during graduate school.
2015: Flying the nest
Starting January, the University decisions started coming in, and it felt like waiting for a letter from Hogwarts. I was keen about three schools — having done some preliminary homework about the department, tuition fees, living expenses, campus life, job opportunities, etc., one of them being my eventual alma mater, Indiana University in Bloomington.
The first semester was the toughest one for me. I had opted for the three most sought after courses, and while the courses themselves were top notch, little did I know that they would also be the most demanding. During the initial days, I felt like a deer caught in headlights and probably slept an average of about five hours a day that semester between all the classes, labs, assignments, cooking, commute, and work. I was lucky to have a great flatmate in my friend from high school who had also come to IU. I managed to get a job as a project assistant and helped the Geology department run climate models on IU’s supercomputers, thanks to my stint at IISc.
Nevertheless, the courses I took during this semester were instrumental in convincing me to pivot from HPC to the data domain. The assignments and projects I worked on required me to do a lot of self-learning, pick the professors’ brains during office-hours, and as the semester progressed, I saw myself enjoying working with data and this further piqued my interest in Machine Learning.
I was greatly helped by Prof. Philip Guo’s blog (pgbovine.net), articles and videos which had noteworthy content about navigating through grad life.
2016: Decoding Grad Life
By the beginning of next spring, I had somewhat understood how to survive and thrive in the grad school grind. This time around, I made a more judicious choice of courses, which would open up some additional time on my calendar and allow me to explore things outside my coursework. I was also able to get a job as a Teaching Assistant and helped teach undergrad students Python programming and systems architecture during this semester. It was very insightful to learn how differently the undergraduate courses were structured in the US, and the students’ approach to learning, compared to the status quo in India. I explored Bloomington, took long walks, rode the bus or biked around the campus, whenever time permitted. There were other students from India living close by, and we would often cook together or meet up for chai sessions. I spent a lot of my free evenings swimming, working out or playing racquetball at the University recreation center.
Around the end of January, I received an e-mail from IU’s Business School about a fellowship opportunity sponsored by their Innovation & Entrepreneurship Center. They were looking for applicants with prior experience with bootstrapping, or with ideas for a new venture. I applied explaining my experiences and learnings from Amigo, and detailing a new idea for a campus wide bike sharing program. After a few weeks of evaluations, they awarded twenty fellowships to students across all campuses of IU and I was one among them. As part of this program, they flew us to the Bay Area for a week, for a first hand experience of Silicon Valley’s startup ecosystem. We got tours of several tech companies and were hosted by UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business where we had an opportunity to interact and network with the founders, early employees and VCs, and learn about their journeys and stories. This was an amazing experience and spending over a week with folks from such differing backgrounds and interests helped me gain a deeper understanding about the American entrepreneurial setup. Moving to the Bay Area next year for work was something I hadn’t foreseen.
Fall, in Bloomington — as in most of the midwest, is beautiful! It’s the perfect weather for a hoodie and cup of coffee. This is also the time of the year when all second year graduate students start applying for jobs, and peer pressure starts setting in, slowly but surely. So, in addition to the the coursework, there was an incremental daily quota of Leetcode or HackerRank problems which needed to be solved, followed by a couple of months of interviews, rejections, more interviews, and finally, a couple of offers.
By the end of the semester, I got a call from a hiring manager at Anthem who seemed to have found my resume from the applicant pool, apparently liked my website and decided to give me a shot for an internship position. The initial rounds went well, and they invited me to Indianapolis for on-site interviews, where I met the team I’d potentially be working with. I got the confirmation email the next day, and even though this was the outcome I was hoping for, it was a bittersweet feeling, since it meant bidding an early goodbye to Bloomington and the friends there! (Although I’d be just an hour’s drive away).
There’s a lot more to be said about my alma mater. Here is a Bloomington 101 blog I had written after shortly after graduation.
And you run, and you run to catch up with the sun but it’s sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
2017: California Calling
Starting January, I joined the Obamacare team at Anthem and worked with their data group. Both during University and at work, I’ve been lucky to have wonderful mentors, who not only helped me ramp up on the academic and professional side of things, but also introduced me to wide-ranging topics such U.S. politics, investing, country music and electric cars, to name a few.
To sync with my mentor’s timings here, I too worked (the rather unusual window) between 7:00 AM and 3:00 PM. We were the first ones in the office and also the first to leave. While I initially found it a bit taxing to be in office before sunrise during the cold Indy mornings, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as I was done with my work when it was still mid-day on the west coast, where I was mostly applying for full-time roles. This gave me enough time to prepare for, and schedule interviews in the afternoons and evenings. If you’ve been through the new grad job hunt phase, you probably know that landing your first full time job is a full time job by itself. I goofed up during the first couple of interviews, started doing better gradually and went through my fair share of rejections and ghosting by recruiters, before getting my first offers. LinkedIn gave out trials of their Premium membership plan to students, which used to let you send direct messages to anyone on the platform, and the naivety in me decided the best way to use them was to contact CEOs/CTOs of companies directly. Of course, I never heard back from any of them — except one! Now, as a part of the Velocity conference (2016), I had visited the LinkedIn HQ in Bay Area, and had a chance to briefly interact with the then CEO, Jeff Weiner.
Knowing that it was a long shot, I used my last credit to send him a message, re-introducing myself and to my surprise, he remembered! (Or so I’d like to think). In less than an hour, I received a call from a very curious LinkedIn recruiter. We went through the initial phone screens and was put on track for the interviews. Unfortunately or fortunately, the gaps between successive rounds was too long, and in the meantime, I received an offer from SAP in Palo Alto, whom I ended up joining eventually.
That summer, I moved to California. I joined SAP as a part of the 2017 Next Talent cohort and worked with the Cloud Machine Learning Team. Being my first full-time job after grad school, I remember confidently thinking during my orientation that I would retire here one day as a C-level executive.
2018: Wanderlust
Bay Area was welcoming, and in many ways reminiscent of my hometown, Bangalore — which too is home to migrant techies. I was learning a lot of new things at work, and had the chance to work in the intersection of ML and Engineering. I was beginning to make sense of how the B2B industry functions and was part of a well positioned team working on building ML applications for SAP’s enterprise customers. One aspect that is often overlooked in academia is taking ML apps into production. I was eager to delve into and learn more about it.
Outside of work, I spent the weekends with friends exploring the many hiking trails in the Bay Area, and traveling to national parks and cities around us during the occasional long weekends. It helped that one of my best friends I’ve known for over two decades was also here, and we rented an apartment together, which became the de-facto weekend hangout for friends. During spring, I had a chance to visit the SAP offices in Germany. Additionally, I also took some time off and backpacked around northern Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. As part of this trip, I visited Frankfurt, Heidelberg, Walldorf, Berlin, Potsdam, Munich, Cologne, Brussels and Amsterdam. While the initial part of the trip was a more familiar experience — staying at hotels, traveling with people you know, dining at popular establishment etc., the latter part of the trip was a refreshing experience. It was my first time staying in hostels, hitchhiking, catching a cross-country train, driving across the Autobahn without worrying about a speeding ticket, exploring local eateries and sharing experiences with fellow travelers. I met some very interesting folks during this time and it broke many unconscious biases and misconceptions I had about people and traveling. I highly recommend backpacking alone/in a small group and find it to be a great time for introspection. It helped change my perspective on many things and expand the boundaries of my comfort zone.
Back at work, I was gradually taking on more responsibilities as new members joined and older ones left the team. (I was surprised by the attrition rate at tech companies.) While learning the ropes of applying Data Science and Machine Learning to address business questions, the insights shared through the works folks like DJ Patil and Chris Albon played a major role in shaping my perspective about the industry and helped me in charting my course. I brought together some like minded folks in the company, and we participated (and won) hackathons — one where we built a text summarization model to capture the gist of large bodies of text, which became the MVP of what SAP’s Service Cloud uses today, and another where we finished as finalists building an Alexa powered hand gesture application for the hearing and speech impaired. (Excuse the video/music quality. The whole thing was put together in < 36 hours).
This was also the year I took greater interest in Yoga, reading and the stock market. I started building up my library and discovered amazing writers like Yuval Noah Harari and Malcolm Gladwell. I was very curious about the sheer volume of money that starts flowing when the floodgates of the market open everyday and wanting to learn more about it, took up a course on options trading and technical analysis. While I made some money and lost some, it did help me better understand the dynamics of the stock market and become comfortable with it’s volatility. Since then, I’ve become slightly more wise and moved away from options trading to more passive, long term investing, as the former demands a lot of time and active monitoring (though selling periodic covered call options is a good strategy in my books).
2019: Change is the only constant
Being the last full year we had before the global pandemic, 2019 was good both in terms of professional and personal life. Work progressed well, did a fair bit of domestic traveling, and got engaged!
Upon my return though, there were some changes brewing. There was a larger organizational change within the company with teams being moved around, and after a few days of uncertainty, I was reassigned to a new team, which was based out of Newport Beach, in southern California. I was not too keen about moving to SoCal, but agreed to fly down for a couple of weeks and test the waters (pun intended). Though I liked the team, and it would’ve been a good internal step up for me in the company, relocating again wasn’t really on the top of my agenda. More importantly, my fiancée was all set to start her grad school in the Bay Area the following year, and thus began my job hunt 2.0.
In the next couple of months, I brushed up on my interviewing skills and interviewed with multiple teams. After a series of calls and on-sites, I received a couple of offers (and more than a couple of rejects) — one of which was from a startup called Zaplabs (now acquired by Anywhere Real Estate) which specializes in building tech and data solutions for the real estate space, whom I decided to join in the fall of 2019.
I’ve always liked a short commute, and to be closer to work, I moved to an apartment at the Emeryville Marina near Berkeley. It remains to be the most picturesque place I’ve lived in, so far, with views of the Bay Bridge, SF skyline, Alcatraz and the Golden Gate. Very soon, though, I’d find out proximity to workplace would become irrelevant!
2020: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times
While I loved my time at SAP, right from day one at my new workplace, the differences between the modus operandi of a large software giant compared to that of a leaner team was very apparent to me. I liked the agility of a smaller group and it helped me gain much greater control and visibility of what we were building. I got to know almost everyone in the company by name and had had coffee with at least half of them in the first couple of months. Over the last couple of years, I started building my professional network outside the office too, and came to know many folks working in Data Science. This had led to one of my first speaking engagements — as a guest speaker to the graduating batch of students from Notre Dame University where I spoke to them about breaking into the industry. It seemed to have been well received, and for the second year in a row, I was invited to speak to their students as part of a Data Science Immersion panel. Such experiences opened more doors for pro-bono engagements in writing, speaking, mentoring students and open source development.
As planned, I flew back to India early in 2020 for my wedding. Our reception was attended by about three thousand people. (Pre-Covid era). If you aren’t from India, that’s not an unreasonably high number for a wedding turnout. We were lucky enough to travel to the hill stations of northern India for our honeymoon and return to the US before the pandemic hit. I still keep hearing (as of Jan 2022) that our wedding was the last event in the family attended by everyone before the lockdowns set in. Once back, I remember meeting my co-workers in office a day before the California shelter-in-place order was passed and collectively thinking we might all need to work from home for about a couple of weeks or a month, at most. This March (2022), it will be be two years since then! The initial lockdowns sent people into a frenzy, and folks had a hard time finding bare essentials for the first few weeks. I recall going to at least five stores in vain, trying to find hand sanitizers, only to come home and see it being sold online by hoarders for 5x it’s actual price. It was sad seeing neighborhood coffee shops and local small businesses being forced to close due to the lockdowns.
Working from home was a new ball game, altogether. While a lot of work got done and team productivity skyrocketed in the Jira burn-down charts, there was no denying that the office had come into our living rooms and bedrooms. Though it took me some time to figure out how to manage work hours efficiently and separate office time and home time, I’ve come to like the flexibility it brings. On the flip side, I miss the water cooler conversations, and seeing colleagues in person. I only recognize the new joinees by their Slack/Zoom pictures and would probably walk right past them if we meet outside. I hope there would be a hybrid approach where you can meet your co-workers, in person, once in a while.
Luckily, my wife and I had each other’s company to keep ourselves entertained during the initial few months of the lockdown when we couldn’t meet another human being for weeks at a stretch. Otherwise, the period between March to December of 2020 was mostly uneventful, and seemed like Groundhog Day, everyday.
Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
2021: The new normal
Back home in India, while things were mostly alright during the first wave in 2020, the second wave in 2021 hit the country badly. It was a dark few months when almost everyday one would hear news of the virus being severe and even fatal to people they knew. It was a while before vaccines were readily available and the inability to travel with all the flights grounded, made me feel ever so helpless. A few friends and I created a small fund and helped public hospitals in our home state procure medical supplies, though it was probably a just drop in the ocean. My parents also tested positive during this period, but thanks to a couple of my close friends who are doctors in Bangalore, they were able to get the necessary medical advice over the phone to support them through their recovery.
Early last year, I started doing pro-bono consulting with the state Govt. of Karnataka and PAC India, and most recently pitched in with efforts related to managing data for SDGs. On the professional front, I had the opportunity to contribute to some interesting projects which took off, and was promoted to a senior role. That April, I was given the responsibility to mentor and manage a student from Cornell who was interning with our team for the summer. Personally, this was the role I’d felt most responsible for, until then, as this would be a formative experience for her, and I wanted to make sure it was good. I did some digging into few of the well known internship programs out there and developed an onboarding checklist and a 16 week internship roadmap to make things as smooth as possible. We zeroed in on an interesting project based on peer-to-peer networks, which could potentially be valuable to business. I enjoyed the mentoring role and the summer turned out to be very productive. The project demo was well received within the company and was adjudged the best project amongst those in her cohort. After the summer, the project went on to be further developed to include additional functionalities and we’re currently (2022) evaluating it for a patent. Over the coming months, the leadership trusted me enough to let me manage junior data scientists joining our team, and I seem to like the added responsibility, thus far!
Now that many companies are drawing up plans to gradually reopen offices, and with the most recent COVID waves being relatively milder, I’d like to be cautiously optimistic about what the new year brings! I hope the world can turn the page on COVID once and for all in 2022, and bring back the good old days where we can all finally be free from masks, booster shots and constantly checking if our mic is on mute during meetings.
Onwards and upwards!
The time is gone, the song is over, thought I’d something more to say.
