Four years at IIT Bombay.
I got in through the front door, AIR 749 in JEE Advanced among 150k+ candidates, 100 percentile in JEE Mains Mathematics, a KVPY fellowship (AIR 689). But the degree was the smaller half of what IIT Bombay gave me; the bigger half was learning to build institutions, not just projects.
students represented as elected General Secretary
departments covered by the Minor in Economics I pioneered
alumni in the PAN-IIT Economics network I helped build
General Secretary, Department of Economics
Awarded the Institute Organizational Special Mention and the Department Roll of Honour for outstanding leadership and departmental impact.
- Spearheaded academic, professional, and community initiatives for student welfare, including the department's first Economics Day, hosted with the Chief Economic Advisor.
- Pioneered the Minor in Economics: 15 courses opened across 26 departments, in collaboration with faculty on curriculum enhancement.
- Strengthened alumni relations and career support: a PAN-IIT Economics alumni network of 10k+ serving 600+ B.S. Economics students across four IITs.
- Introduced platforms for peer learning, mentorship, and student-faculty engagement, the seed of what later became Yorbit.
Selected competition work
- 1st place, Credit Score Algorithm challenge (Finsearch, 235 teams), five ensemble & deep-learning models on 3,000+ borrowers at 92% accuracy.
- AIR 13 of 213 teams, Convolve log-anomaly hackathon: 4.1M+ logs classified at 99.99% accuracy despite an 8:500 class imbalance.
- Top 6, oil-price forecasting (CNN-LSTM with walk-forward validation, 78% accuracy).
What it taught me
That getting 26 departments to agree on anything is harder than any algorithm, and that the persuading-humans half of engineering is a skill you can practice deliberately.