Three Pivotal Decisions + Tech-Expeditions

Three Pivotal Decisions + Tech-Expeditions

- 17 mins
Internship Journey Insights

Table of Contents:

I’m Aitik, and this is me reflecting on some incredible chapters of my life.

This blog is a narration of 3 pivotal decisions I’ve made in my formative years that shaped my core.

To get your attention, here’s a list of companies/programs that I’ve interned at in during my university time (all off-campus):

I’ll take you through a journey starting with having nothing to add on my resume, to deleting experiences so that I can fit everything on a single page.

Pre-University Era

I did my schooling from Delhi.. which at the time used to have a state-quota of 80% seats.

So with my decent-ish rank, I had options to choose from some premier instituitions: Delhi Technological University (DTU), Netaji Subhas University of Technology (NSUT), Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT-Delhi), among other colleges through JAC (Joint Admission Committee), Delhi.

I however did something else entirely, which did not pass muster with a lot of people.

First Pivotal Decision

By and through the counselling time, I had realised something important about myself. Up till this point, the only awareness I had was on my academic (and a few off-beat) pursuits, which left my personal skills largely uncharted.

Sure, I’d participated in a few school events.. but it wasn’t nearly enough “co-curricular”..

Akin to fleeting touch of water on your fingertips.. instead of an immersive plunge I feel it really should have been?

In this wave of self-awareness, figuring out the gaping holes in my “wisdom”.. a chain of thoughts led me to the first pivotal decision to shape my core:

I decided to move away from Delhi, and my comfort zone with it.

I might’ve been inspired from Siddhartha Gautama’s story.. now that I look back at it. But as long as I was in my comfort zone I would’ve never understood what I never knew.

And that is why I went ahead with All India (JoSAA) counselling, instead of Delhi’s JAC board.. and eventually ended up at Indian Institute of Information Technology, Gwalior.

First Year: all fun and games

As I stepped on this new path of self-discovery, my immediate focus shifted toward honing my communication skills - both verbal and written - developing the confidence to express myself openly.

So I actively engaged in a lot of events, clubs and extracurricular activities.

A few months later, I acted out Mark Antony’s “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” speech (embedded it in my memories from school) on a stage, entitling me to Mr. Parichay (Or Mr. Fresher, as some dialects dictate).

^This was the beginning of two semesters full of participating/organising/part-timing as a pet owner (long story).

WishPet

^The "long story"

All this virtually left no time for any technical development.. or so I thought.

Sure, me and some of my friends occassionally used to solve one or two coding problems ~ slowly building up an ego blanket of being 5 star coders on Hackerrank 😜, then blaming the myriad of to-be-learnt topics when we couldn’t solve two oots of problems in a competitive setting.

I used to look at other masters of coding in my batch and feel the impostor syndrome kicking in (I had CS in +2) ~ but then waves of procrastination used to take away my zeal, and I’d anyways always have something to fill my time up with.

Second Pivotal Decision

All this built up profound unawareness came crashing, as I ended my first year with no solid technical improvements ~ this was time for the second pivotal decision that shaped my core.

Determined to reach a technological epiphany, I decided to completely remove Windows from my potato PC, and embraced Linux as my one and only.

Now this might not sound like a “pivotal” decision to the reader.. but as I reflect on it while penning down this blog, I can’t help but break into a Cheshire cat’s grin.. having confidence that this small decision had a huge impact on my core. How?

It taught me how to struggle my way through problems, especially when there’s no one around to help you.

I kid you not, there had been countless nights of me stomping my head on my own laptop to get the bluetooth module working, for example. 😂

Second Year: machine learning prologue

My roommate from first year had this newfangled interest in Machine Learning by the end-semester summer holidays, at the time:

BlackCatZoningOut

^1st year

I had ample amount of time by this point, as I decided to remove myself from some organisations / clubs / activities.

Except the dramatics and a techno-managerial forum (both endowed me the best mentors I’ve had) 💫

So I really took my friend’s advice when he said:

“Deep Learning ke courses karle, usme Machine Learning bhi seekh jayega.”

(Do Deep Learning courses, they’ll teach you Machine Learning as well)

This was downright one of the worst advices I’ve ever been given that I’d religiously followed.

(If you do not count Engineering in itself 😉 ~ jk)

So I started these deep learning courses, which showed me all these gorgeous graphics for linear regression 🥰… but then started with Reinforcement learning/Generative models 💀??!

Obviously, things started shoo’ing over.. I realised I needed some mathematical foundations before all this.. so I started all over in my 3rd semester with Andrew Ng’s courses, and learning Python from the very basics.

MachineLearningAndrewNg

IYKYK 😆 (source)

Internship: Healthcare (first one with a salary)

Before I move ahead with the story, I’d like to quickly mention the time I did an unpaid internship at DRDO (Defence Research and Development Organisation) during the summer vacations at the end of my 1st year in Delhi.

So I empathise with juniors who come up to me ask should they consider doing an unpaid internship too: “..but in these times? hell naw kid”.

Jumping back to a year later.. by the end of my 2nd year I got an opportunity to work with a team in Boston around their virtual physical rehabilitation application using Machine Learning.

Specifically, Human Pose Estimation. (read about HPE, interesting concept)

This was my first internship with a stipend ~ was paid in some peanuts.

Most of my work involved around fixing/improving a subpar C++ codebase that handled the heavy lifting (inferencing through a human-pose-estimation model), intended to run on both iOS and Android.

One of the side-projects (any action -> any model), which obviously never made it across localhost (you can see why 😂)

One eventuality from this internship was that it made me weigh up so many research papers, it ignited my research interest, too. (only to be crushed later ~ read further)

Third Year: machine learning epilogue

I shared this cool application of HPE with a friend (also interested in data side of ML).. and without skipping a beat we dove into experimenting & writing our own research paper. Surprisingly, it got accepted at a conference and is now up on the ACM digital library:

This was half the fun, sorry Aadit 😂

With me choosing to end that machine learning internship (and the full-time role they were willing to offer alongside college), I went through another round of self-awareness epiphany.. which led me to the third pivotal decision to shape my core.

Third Pivotal Decision

On a deeper self-retrospective, I cognized that during my “machine learning” internship I was more excited about the practical improvements (fixing haywire of pointers/memory leaks/logical flaws) I made to the source code.. than the research/theoretical part of it.

Moreover, from an applied engineering perspective, trying to find a job in this landscape without a decent research background or interest was (and is) tough.

Given this line of reasoning, I decided to put an end to my short stint of machine learning jouney and switch to a traditional software engineering path.

What do I mean by a “software engineering” path? I started low-level code-contributions to open-source libraries I usually used at that time:

..which later helped me during my Google Summer of Code, but we’ll get to that in a bit.

Fellowship: MLH (food for resume)

A lot of times people demand genuity in projects, and usually scorn at template projects (that’s right, looking at you, TO-DO List in React). While template projects have their merits, they tend to simply pale in comparison to the fiercely competitive landscape.

Most of my batchmates/seniors/juniors used to follow the trend of learning MERN stack to dive deeper in backend/frontend paradigms. I however don’t share the same journey as them.. coming from a Python/C++ background, I decided to stick with those languages to plunge into backend.

MLHFellowship

My MLH pod

This fellowship was in January ‘21 (6th semester), and with lockdown imposed I had exorbitant amounts of time ~ contributing to open source, figuring out the “Data Structures & Algorithms” part of my journey, etc.

I never explored DSA in depth before the end of my 3rd year.

During this MLH Fellowship, I learnt two soft skills.. how to:

  1. communicate in a team consisting of people from all around the world
  2. work in all the timezones that can exist 😭

Only the projects that I worked on during this fellowship exist on my resume (as of today, the time of writing this). I wrote blogs about them, ofcourse.. a habit I highly procrastinate-yet-love.

Fourth Year: everything, at one place, all at once

Open-Source: GSoC

This was during the summer holidays (as if that mattered during lockdown) at the end of my 3rd year.

A generic day used to look like this:

…

My theory was simple: stay enough time on your PC, and there’s bound to be a productive time when some 10 minutes are worth 10 long hours)

MatplotlibWeekly

Matplotlib dev team, amazing people ✨

This will probably hurt a lot of influencers’ opinions, but I needed data structures and memoised recursions for my work at Matplotlib during GSoC. 😆

Internship: B2B Travel industry

While my GSoC project involved some low-level programming (details in my other blogs), my immediate next internship involved working with highly abstracted frameworks such as Flask/MongoDB/GraphQL with a very-early team based in San Francisco for a retreat-planning software.

GSoC community helped me here, to get in touch with them.

RetreraTeam

Small team, great culture ⭐

Since I was dealing in dollars this time, this internship is when I made max bucks with half as much pressure compared to Indian firms.

Internship: FinTech

I interviewed with FamPay (applied directly, without a referral).. just as my previous internship ended.

The next few months of FinTech experience was when I really started understanding how real life applied software engineering works at noticeable scale.

Some takeaway learnings:

FamPayOffSite

Me after:

With the conclusion of this internship, I finally felt that feeling of self-reliance (very rare these days).. that I probably won’t go jobless when I graduate.

This was an optimistic hunch, I never knew placements for 2023 batch will be godawful.

Internship: FoodTech

Cut short a few months, I applied to SuprDaily (a Swiggy acquisition) for a software engineering internship position.. this time with a referral.

The entire concept of internship hunt had started becoming gruelling, now that OaaS was becoming popular.

(Section of my previous blog, for context)

Most of this internship revolved around building Proof of Concepts (PoCs) for real-time demand shaping based on Go services (my first interaction ever with this language).

Some takeaway learnings:

Fifth year: emotional maturity

As my fifth and final year began, I started gaining clarity of what the upcoming months and quarters had in store for me.

Internship: C2C (abroad)

When the internship at SuprDaily ended, I received a summer internship offer from Mercari JP.

The complete interview and relocation process is documented here.

And so, after a long set of walks around the academic/administration/stationary to get NOC, I travelled to Japan.. solo.

Speaking of solo, here’s a list of random spontaneous things I regularly engaged in:

First "on-site" internship.. some crazy learnings, and some better off not-documented 😂

Internship: FinTech (credit)

A couple months after I came back to India, I interviewed with this Bangalore-based startup offering crazy benefits. (It was my last semester, so I was allowed to go on-site again)

I had some amazing ownership at BharatX as an intern, where I developed real-time fraud prevention services from the get-go.

Even though the exposure to the startup ecosystem & monetary benefits were immense, I felt “too much” ownership at this early stage of my career was like a double-edged sword.

Why?

Those few months in Bangalore made me endure some great lows and highs, enough for me to make some pivotal decisions (fully envisioning it documented if I was writing this article a few years down the line).

I left after a few months, not primarily because of these reasons, but mostly due to my personal reasons.

Internship: B2C Travel industry

Headout was the icing on the cake of my college internship journey - it was just what I needed at that point.

I applied via internal referral and joined their booking-management (backend) team in April ‘23.

With absolutely brilliant engineers around me, I had an exhilarating time there. Some key takeaways this time:

HeadoutOffSite

Winning treasure hunt in an off-site

Post-University Era

After five years of a rollercoaster career journey, it was about time I jotted down some of the minute parts (mostly tech-related).. making sure not to mention countless non-academic escapades - some are probably better off reserved for me.. and some to my friends (BH-1 supremacy). 😝

I joined Mercari as a full-time employee in October ‘23.. around the same time I’m writing this tenth-rate of a blog.

Random Shibuya dump 🥶

Ending notes

With what I’ve seen and experienced, here’s some generic software-engineering things I feel might be relevant:

Investing time

This is one of the most important learnings a lot of people miss out on.. there’s no “enough-time” to master things in software engineering.

It’s like a scoop of honey which you can’t just lick once (and immediately know-it-all).. it gets thicker and sweeter as you spend time stirring it.

^This is how I now define “backend” to people.. might be true for a whole lot of other concepts, too.

Importance of (good) mentors

Looking back to whatever short amount of time I can look back at, I’d credit a lot to the amazing mentors I’ve had along the way. 🙇🏻

I was helped out with:

Here’s a piece of advice if you’re someone in your formative years:

While a good mentor can undoubtedly propel you far on journey, don’t forget that your own efforts and groundwork play an equally crucial role in shaping you.

Importance of struggle

I have utmost respect for the concept of struggle. I strongly believe it adds value to your life regardless of the result, directly or indirectly.

You may not be very bright, you may not possess natural skills (personal attacc).. but if given enough time, your hard-smart-work will always get you either:

I hope this adds value to your life, reader.

I’m off-to new experiences ~ and I wish the same for you. ❤️

Dropping my socials in case you wanna have a chat (or have a doubt):

   
Website: aitikgupta.com - You’re here right now
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/aitikgupta
GitHub: github.com/aitikgupta
Instagram: instagram.com/aitikgupta

…you get the point, I go by @aitikgupta throughout the web! \o/

Related Posts

Aitik Gupta

Aitik Gupta

I go by @aitikgupta throughout the web! \o/

comments powered by Disqus
rss facebook twitter github gitlab gitlab youtube mail spotify lastfm instagram linkedin google google-plus pinterest medium vimeo telegram stackoverflow reddit quora quora key download slideshare speakerdeck googlescholar researchgate mendeley orcid impactstory figshare pubmed