Ishan Patil — SDE 2 @ Amazon, MS (Stanford University)
We bring you Ishan Patil! He graduated in 2016 in the discipline of Electrical Engineering from IIT Indore. Read on to know more about this…
During B.Tech from IIT Indore, what was your internship experience?
In the second year, I got interested in Hardware, Digital Electronics. This led me to do an internship at L&T, Mumbai, where I was a Firmware Engineering Intern, RADAR software/hardware team. It was my first introduction to programming. While in college, I was actively involved in the Electronics Club. Apart from that, I was involved with Arduino programming. So this and my L&T internship helped me understand how programming is useful in our lives and basically, making-things-happen. Now, this was where my interest in what I even do now came from.
How did you bag the DAAD scholarship? And what did you do there?
After my second year, I came to know about DAAD, a scholarship given to students for their study in Germany. For bagging DAAD internship, you need to have a high pointer (I stood first in my class), an invitation from a German professor, a recommendation from our college professor. The University that I applied to was the University of Munich. The area that I focussed on was digital electronics, signal processing. The internship was hosted by the Hybrid Control Systems Lab. Under the supervision of Dr. Majid Zamani, I contributed to the development (in MATLAB and C) of a vision-based robot control system.
What was your experience in IITI like? And what do you regret not doing/ doing during your time there?
While working for my internship, I was involved in the activities of the Electronics Club. I also developed an interest in Arduino. I was also a founder of the Electronics Club.
The thing that I regret was that I didn’t do programming as much. I wasn’t doing CP, DSA at all. I was more focused on EE, like doing MATLAB. The more early you get exposed to CP, DSA, computer vision, ML, which are the future, the better.
Also, you need to be really good in one programming language, preferably Python or C++. Although you need to know other languages, you need to have breadth, but you require depth as well in one language.
What led you to do an MS program?
The idea of doing my Master’s program abroad was in my mind, since the third year. At that time, I wasn’t really interested in doing a job. I was more interested in doing research. Also, I had no experience in software engineering, web development. I was quite lucky to have a good background in Robotics, research, an internship abroad, and a nice CGPA. That helped me to get admits from several schools abroad like Stanford, UCSD, Georgia Tech, USC, University of Pennsylvania.
How did you get into Stanford?
For that, I gave GRE and TOEFL. I gave GRE in my fourth year while my BTP was going on. For GRE, I had to improve my vocabulary for the verbal reasoning part. But, the quantitative reasoning part was like 10th standard maths, so it was quite easy. But the verbal section was quite tricky for me. I scored 327/340 in GRE. CGPA does matter if you apply directly after your Bachelor’s degree. If you do have some industry experience, they will take that into consideration as well. I gave TOEFL directly after GRE.
How was your time at Stanford?
In my first year there, I wasn’t so sure about my interests, so I took courses in ML, Algorithms, Image processing. That lead to my interest in the intersection of software and computer vision. So I applied for internships. I got offers from MathWorks (MATLAB), Google (for hardware internship), and Nvidia (for software internship). I opted for the Nvidia since I was really interested in Computer vision, ML, at that time.
What is the difference between the course curriculum of Stanford and IITI?
In IITI, all the courses are designed to impart theoretical knowledge, which is quite different from Stanford. There we select our subjects, according to our interests. The courses at Stanford are cumbersome and take up most of your time.
What do you do at Amazon?
I have been in Amazon for the last two years, working in computer vision and Robotics. I am a Software Engineer there. So my day-to-day work requires programming in C++ and a little bit in Python.
Any message to your juniors?
I would just like to say that explore everything. Even if you get into schools like Stanford, or get a nice job, You won’t be happy or satisfied, if you don’t like what you are doing. Be open-minded, and don’t follow too much what others are doing. Everybody has their mindsets and interests.
So all the best, everyone, for your journey ahead!!
We thank Ishan for providing us some great insights and answering the questions in-depth about his journey. We hope it helps other students preparing for similar roles.
