P.G. Keerthana Gopalakrishnan — Interview #4

Keerthana graduated from IIT Kharagpur with Dual Degree in Mechanical Engineering and is currently pursuing her masters at the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. During her stay at IIT Kharagpur, she was a part of a number of activities like being the coordinator for the Branding and Relations Cell, being an editor in the campus newspaper, The Scholar’s Avenue and volunteering for the Disha Seema School.

She was involved in a number of projects and her long list of internships include those at Schlumberger, University of Alberta and General Electric. Apart from having an excellent academic profile, Keerthana is one of the people who believe in having an opinion and expressing it. She is someone who inspires people around her to push their boundaries and keep excelling at something new everyday.

How does it feel reaching where you are?

Where I am right now is just another stop in the journey, and I’ve miles to go. :) I feel good that some of my pursuits paid off. What people see is just the few successes you’ve managed, what they don’t is the tons of times you’ve failed before that.

How was your stay at IIT Kgp and how did college help you grow as a person? What lessons or experiences you took back from your stay here?

IIT Kharagpur has been one of the most formative experiences of my life. I did many things during the time, but something that struck a chord with me was working at Disha Seema School. Listening to the experiences of Hansa ma’am and trying to understand the drivers for the kids and their parents helped me realised that a whole different world exists beyond our social strata and how much more there is to be done.

Some lessons I learnt:

1. Rules and organisations are made up of people. So, it is important to use them to your advantage than stop at being constrained by them.

2. Being a team player is very important and there is something to learn from everyone. Nothing important today is achieved alone and we all rest on the shoulders of giants.

3. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. If you ask the question today, you may look stupid but you learn something; if you don’t you stay stupid forever.

4. Career is 30+ years long. Don’t do a greedy policy by taking that fat paying job, choose options that can build real skills, hard and soft today.

5. We are a collective average of the people around us, so surround yourself with smart and creative people that help you become a better version of yourself while also looking out for others that need a hand.

Where do you see yourself in the next 5–7 years? What inspires you to pursue your dreams?

I see myself running my own tech company. Two things inspire me, I like doing tech and I care about society. I think that the biggest honey trap of our generation is finding comfort in a corporate job, because you may be the smartest but you won’t be able to bring disruptive change or fundamentally change the way people think by being a cog in a big wheel. If we only have 30 years of a career we should use that to build our own dreams than spend a lifetime working for somebody else’s. Then again, to become effective at that, one needs to build skills, technical and organisational.

Which phase of life or experience of yours motivated you to pursue the profession you currently are in?

When in 11th grade, I remember being fascinated by Japanese light robots that moved on water surface imitating mosquitoes. Since then, whenever teachers would ask in class about what you wanna do in the future, I’d blurt out ‘Robotics’, even though I had absolutely no clue about the subject. It just sounded sophisticated and cool aand cool at the time. I loved Physics in high school and therefore chose Mechanical Engineering. At IIT, there was a time when I was crazy about probability and stochastics and ended up doing a minor in Math and Computing. In fact, after learning that cars that pass by at a bus stop followed a poisson distribution, I volunteered for several mess duty hours at MT hall to see if the number of girls who came for food in any five minute interval followed the distribution. It was crazy and my friends were more than happy to give me their mess hours. Later on, I hung out with people who did cool things with programming, websites and widgets, and picked up on it. I was in mech but realised that some of the most important problems in the world today were solved with CS, and chose unconventional thesis topics simply because they were interesting. Looking backward, I can connect the dots while I had no clue then and it is the collective sum of experiences that brought me to where I am now.

How did your stay and experience at IIT Kharagpur influence and nurture your career goals?

IIT gave me a lot of free time and the opportunity to experiment with different fields. The cost of failure was little and that helps you take many chances, learn, do and fail. Coming from a small town, I was amazed and inspired looking at seniors and realising all the things one can possibly do. Be it going to law school after engineering, walking along the Ganges or becoming the CM of Delhi, one can do just about anything after KGP.

What kind of hurdles did you face being a female? What are some of the failures you experienced or some challenging situations when you felt like giving up?

1. I was one among 3 women in my class of 133 and it wasn’t the most optimal situation, for example you couldn’t do group study or get notes easily. Because of the skewed sex ratio, it was hard to collaborate since often you’re the only woman in a group and had to inconvenience everybody else by choosing a location like library or maggu room instead of meeting at hall.

2. Women in general face higher difficulty getting involved in projects because there’s nobody to help you out when stuck or have a doubt and there was no peer group to work with since few women knew programming well and fewer wanted to program for leisure. In fact, we had formed a society called Bitchsters( Bitch-sisters), comprising of some fantastic women from our batch as a sort of badass ecosystem to support each other. I founded a startup with one of them. We also organised couple of workshops for junior girls. Community, I think, is very important for developers and we at SN and MT, especially the groups of Tech GC should organise to collaborate with each other, akin to MetaKGP.

3. Imposter syndrome is a real problem among women. When I first came to IIT, I felt that I got in because of luck and was too stupid to be there. That very thought stopped me from attempting at things like DepC. Then I read in Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In about imposter syndrome and it helped me identify these thought patterns in myself, girlfriends and juniors. The extent and effect of the problem surprises me. It has become my mission since to push and mentor people around me to aim higher, especially women.

What is an opportunity you missed or the thing you regret during your stay in Kgp that given a chance, you’d go back in time and change it?

I wish I did more things in general, personal projects in particular. I would go back and spend more time at programming, especially algorithmic programming. I wish I worked on solving engineering problems in the real world, and not just on a computer because they are entirely different ball games. If I could go back I’d join one of the hardcore engineering societies like KRSSG, TeamKART, AGV, etc.

If given administrative powers, one rule you would want to change at IIT Kgp?

I would let people choose their majors, and the subjects they wanna study after they came to IIT. THis is the case in almost everyone foreign university, where you major in subjects you’re interested in, explore your inclinations, take courses that you *want* to learn. My interests evolved into computer science midway through my undergrad and I had little opportunities to pursue that because I was held to a choice five years ago. Some may argue that this would lead everyone in KGP to major in CS. I don’t see the harm in it. Today at MIT, 33% of freshmen have CS as a major. IITs, in my opinion, should produce what the country needs and not an arbitrary number of mining engineers or rubber technologists set in 1950. IITs should evolve to the nation’s and the market’s needs and one way to do that is letting people choose what they wanna study, because market demand would eventually match supply like Keynes said. A lot of my friends were stuck in a branch they clearly weren’t interested, others who knew what they wanted but couldn’t pursue it. Yet many others who, after four years of dedicated education had to pick up data analytics or coding to get employed. This is not an optimal scenario.

How different does life get once you graduate from Kgp? What difference in attitude towards women did you observe after graduating from Kgp?

I’ll try to answer this question as a graduate life vs undergraduate life at KGP because I’ve not experienced much else. Yes, it is very different. Academics at CMU is much more hands-on and about doing. It is a lot more hectic than KGP ever was. One would miss the free time and the flexibility that came with it to try different things. The sense of community at KGP is very strong, which is one factor I miss at graduate school.

About differences in attitude, women are treated much more professionally here. Because there are a lot of women professors, extremely smart women PhD students, and active and nerdy women developers, one is not treated as less-smart or less-capable because of gender alone. It is the ecosystem, the community and the presence of examples that set the tone. This is especially evident when you are part of a team, or during interviews. Diversity and involvement of women are actively encouraged here than seen as a burdensome compulsion.

More than 50% of incoming freshman in CMU’s School of Computer Science this year are women. In India, one still has to fight for 20% reservation for women because a lot of people think that the reason women lag is due to innate talent differences rather than exposure differences and the idea that half of our nation’s best engineers should be women is still not common sense. If you think about it, for every nine men graduating out of kgp, only one woman does, which means the other 8 have fallen behind somewhere along in the system. If this is not an exemplar of the insitutional hurdles women face in our country, I don’t know what is. We have a long way to go.

Who is your role model and how has she/he influenced you in your life?

I don’t have one role model but ideas of many people from many walks of life have stuck with me. I draw from Sheryl Sandberg’s style of feminism and work-life balance. I am inspired by the life and works of Tagore and how his creations continue to move people centuries later. I am inspired by Elon Musk who took moonshot projects that no one thought was realistic and , broke it down to achievable milestones and prioritisinged what is important rather than what is easy. Ben Horowitz’s ideas on running a tech company, William MacAskill’s theory of effective altruism and Nehru/Gandhi’s vision for India and call for love and unity over hatred inspireds me.

What are your opinions on the gender bias that exists in professional life? Do you face discrimination of any sort based on gender?

I have not faced any institutional bias so far. As for discrimination, I guess we all come across an occasional teammate who uses ignorant language or think that women must be bad engineers because they are women. These were minor hurdles for me. There was one instance where I was an intern at Schlumberger and I got to learn that in India, a woman is not allowed in a mine after 6PM and a woman is not allowed on offshore fields by law, severely limiting the options and career accession for women in oil and gas. Not surprisingly, the percentage of women in their executive leadership was a single digit number

Did you feel restricted by the choice of your department at IIT Kharagpur?

Well, yes, slightly. But that is because I chose to enroll at the School of Computer Science at CMU. I’ve a lot of ground to catch up on, especially with respect to getting good at programming. Then again, having studied mechanical engineering, I get good intuition about robotics systems from an assembly standpoint, and can adapt techniques used to solve physics problems to computer science. This has come in handy a lot. Whatever be your branch at KGP, keep your math fundamentals strong because a lot of that knowledge can be transferred across fields.

What is the one utopian thing that you would wish for in today’s society?

I wish everyone was born with empathy. Empathy, in my opinion can solve most problems of the world by making people relate to people with a different gender/caste/class/religion/race, and teaching them to love, despite differences. If everyone had an ownership to other people’s problems, we wouldn’t have any problems in the world.

A message you would like to give to the present students of IIT Kgp.

Just do more things, perfection is the enemy of getting things done. Don’t let anyone fool you that GPA is not important. It is. No matter what you do at KGP, try and maintain a good GPA because it doesn’t take a lot of effort and can open several doors for you later. Aim higher, take more risks. If you’re already doing well, participate in competitions, take an additional course or two. Think about what lies in the intersection of what you’re good at, what your skills are and what you wanna do. Really take the time at IIT to understand who you are, what is important to you, and how you can make a difference to the world.

Interviewed by Nikita Gupta.