From Quiet Classrooms to Cornell Research: A Chemical Engineering Student's Journey at IIT Gandhinagar

At 15, she hesitated to speak up in class out of fear of being wrong, but four years at IIT Gandhinagar transformed her confidence and academic path. Now 21 and in her fourth year of Chemical Engineering, she comes from Pune with both parents working as engineers. After completing Class 10 at Pawar Public School in Pune and finishing grades 11 and 12 at a CBSE school, she gave the JEE Main and JEE Advanced exams in 2023. During JoSAA counselling, she carefully reviewed course structures before choosing Chemical Engineering at IIT Gandhinagar. The institute's four-week foundation programme helped incoming students build friendships before academics began. She later joined student initiatives like the cultural fest, technical fest, the Student Leadership Conclave, and TEDx, eventually becoming a core member of the Finance and Curation team for TEDxIITGandhinagar in her second year. In that role, she worked alongside speakers Dutee Chand, Manish Gupta, and Gaurav Juyal. Flexible academic rules allowed her to spread credits across semesters, balancing heavy workloads with extracurricular commitments. Professors maintained an open-door policy, helping her focus on fundamental problem-solving rather than surface-level answers. Following her third year, she completed a summer internship at Cornell University focusing on semiconductor research. Using computer simulations, she studied how electron behavior and atomic arrangements at material boundaries affect device performance. Outside the lab, her routine includes the campus gym, strength training, cooking, playing the guitar, and reading murder-mystery thrillers in hostel rooms with friends, while frequenting campus spots like Tea Post, the skywalk, and Laal Minar.

Context

Institutes of Technology in India feature rigorous entrance examinations like JEE Main and Advanced, followed by centralized counselling processes to match students with programs. Research internships at foreign universities during undergraduate studies often provide students with hands-on exposure to advanced technical fields like semiconductors and materials science.