Live your questions!
I am Prabha, an undergraduate Electronics and Communication Engineering student at the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Design, and Manufacturing, Kancheepuram.
It is probably all the coming-of-age college movies that I grew up watching — the ones where the protagonist goes to college, makes friends, is betrayed/hurt/some drama, learns a huge life lesson, and lives happily ever after while partying all this while, I almost came into college imagining a low budget version of this. I couldn’t wait to finally live by myself, chart my future.
Like every other Hyderabadi wanting to get into an IIT, I got into coaching classes. I hated all my time there, felt like an outcast. But the dream of getting into an IIT was something I had internalized. There was no IIT at the end of those two years but I decided to let it all go and explore what opportunities this place had. It was the first setback in IIITDM that made me realize that I hadn’t put this struggle behind.
It took only the first two months in college to shatter all these dreams and there I was, with no idea of what to do, now that nothing made sense. I spent a long time choosing to not engage with anyone, not take up anything because I was too scared of failure. This only fueled my fear because I felt no sense of connection with the place. My grades started tanking and that was the final nail in the coffin. I realized I had to do something about it.
I found coping with coaching classes difficult because I did nothing but study and pushed away everything I enjoyed just for the exam. I was doing it to myself again. If I wanted to fix this situation, it meant finding myself again.
I decided to say yes to every opportunity that came my way — I had nothing to lose anyway. I looked forward to the Literature Club sessions because it meant putting my head in a different world — a world that wasn’t plagued with all the worries mine had. I slowly started finding interesting people, new possibilities where I thought there were none. Unlike the movies though, it wasn’t earth-shattering — these experiences made my life livable, easier, they were my escape.
Today when I look back, it was the best decision I made — I wouldn’t have met all the people that keep me sane today, had it not been that.
This was when a senior, Tejaswini Chatty, introduced me to the “Book of Ideas”, a project to condense concepts that were being thought of in the college, to serve as a springboard for anyone trying to build something. Over our conversations, she introduced me to design thinking and the design community on campus. The idea of design was a constant challenge — I was a person who preferred clean lines, organization, and cause-effect. Design was anything but that, it was messy, iterative, and often yielded nothing.
If it was this challenge to my beliefs that made me want to explore the idea, it was the community that made me stay. Every conversation with them impressed on me the clarity they had about what they were doing, something that was almost aspirational for the organizer in my head. It was my third semester and I was already looking forward to Dr. Sudhir’s courses from what I had heard. He asked us a question in the first couple of classes that I kept revisiting all through my college life — “Why are you doing, what you are doing?”, my kryptonite.
I had to pick a project that interested me and work on it while understanding the course material. After bouncing off a bunch of ideas with my team, we turned up empty-handed. Every idea felt interesting but nothing felt compelling enough. One of our exercises before deciding on our projects was to look into our past to understand who we had become. I kept digging into my life to understand if there was something that I kept coming back to. I noticed that I have always been fascinated by designing for the human body.
Here it was, the possibility of charting my life, and boy, was I excited. The only way I could test if my hypothesis was true was by engaging with it. I decided I’d do a project in the biomedical domain every time I was asked for a course project in the lab. When we were asked for an embedded systems project, we designed an assisted leg, when we were asked for a signal processing project, we worked on an algorithm that enhanced the heart rate signal collected by a smart textile.
The healthcare tech community on campus was pretty nascent at that stage, which meant that I would spend hours trying to figure out the problem I was working on and I had very few people I could turn to for direction. This wasn’t always easy. I would have made my life simpler if I had chosen from the list of projects the faculty gave. There were days where I’d curse myself for experimenting because nothing made any sense. But over time, if it was my interest that drove me to take up those projects, it was those projects that pushed me to explore the area further. I had established a positive feedback loop!
This was when I decided to participate in the Startup Sandbox Program, to see if I could build something from scratch. The ability to come up with relevant, context-aware solutions, I noticed, came from an acute awareness of the world the product was housed in and a deep-seated empathy towards the problem — skills I kept developing throughout the program. To understand the world of the product, I had to engage with the medical community who spoke a completely different language than what I, an engineer, was used to.
There were a lot of technological solutions that were available for the problem I was looking at but nobody was using any of them. There clearly was a gap in translating the requirement of the doctor to what was understood by the end-user. We kept trying to engage with this problem and we failed. I realized that I needed to talk to a lot more people who were working at the intersection of health and tech to develop deeper insights. I decided to work with a startup for my internship to understand how they were bridging this gap.
While I was applying to my internships, I couldn’t thank my past self enough for choosing to do all those projects. They opened up doors that wouldn’t have if I hadn’t done them. I interned at a startup working on a wearable for tracking and understanding physiotherapy in people with chronic conditions. This being a small team, allowed me to explore various aspects of a biomedical product while helping me develop a deeper appreciation for algorithm design of biomedical systems. I continued to work in the biomedical space landing a couple of internships and ended up writing a paper based on the work I did.
This was also a time where I was deciding between choosing to work or to pursue further education. At every startup, we’d hit a snag at some point in the development because there wasn’t enough research available or that developing that body of research at a startup needed more understanding of this unique problem and environments to test them in. Biomed products are uniquely placed — a startup had to be built on a mountain of data, research, and user testing, an opportunity that a graduate Biomed school could make more accessible. I strongly felt the need for developing a better skill set to be able to tackle these problems and decided to pursue a Master’s degree.
All this while, I kept noticing how people dealt with transitions and how a community made it easier to adapt to change. Through all my experiences, I had various groups of people lend me an ear and give me direction. I wanted to be able to create spaces that allowed for this freedom and opportunity.
In my first year, it was the Literature club and the design community that made it easier for me to engage with change. I continued to be a part of the Literature club (was first a Coordinator and then a Secretary) to be able to provide people with this possibility to comfortably voice out their opinions and to offer an escape from an otherwise hectic and difficult life.
I was one of the first group of people who heard of the conception of the Undergraduate Mentor-Mentee Program. It was vital for me to provide an incoming student with this atmosphere of acceptance that I had chanced upon. I became an Undergraduate Mentor in my third year, and later the Academic Affairs Secretary, to be able to continue contributing to this project I saw to be so dear to me.
The design community was the one I hold the closest to me. It helped me discover myself and always left me feeling like I belonged. I became a member of the Innovation Council because I felt that a community with shared values could foster creativity and promote collaboration towards common goals. We created a framework for the dialogue about innovation in our institute and started Ground Zero (L009), a space for people to collaborate and connect on similar ideas.
Through all this, there’s one idea I keep returning to, the Design squiggle — the beginnings of any new product design are messy and you keep going back and forth until you chance upon a clear concept. The only way to get through is to engage with the uncertainty. Something that is not just true in product design. Your life at college is going to be messy and very different from what you’ve always dreamt of, all you’ve got to do is to explore what it has to offer and you’ll never be disappointed.
As Rilke said in his letters to young Kappus, “ Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart.
….live in the question”
The pandemic was a curveball for me, another uncertainty that I would have to live with. I have, at the moment, deferred my admission to the Biomedical Engineering Master’s program at the Johns Hopkins University to Fall ’21. I am currently taking this time to work on problems that I have always wanted to pursue and exploring where they would take me.
Prabha Sahiti Mandaleeka
Batch of 2020.
Thanks for taking the time out to read my story! I would love to connect with you, feel free to shoot me an email at sahitiprabha@gmail.com!
