My education was never tied to one city for very long.

I come from a defence background, so moving around was part of life. My dad is a gazetted officer in the Indian Navy, and my schools followed his postings. Vizag, Mumbai, Wellington near Ooty, Delhi. New cities, new schools, new people, new routines.

It wasn't always convenient, but it shaped me.

Schooling

I started at Navy Children School, Visakhapatnam, from LKG to 2nd grade. Then came Navy Children School, Mumbai for 3rd grade, and Army Public School, Wellington, near Ooty, for 4th.

After that I went back to Navy Children School, Visakhapatnam from 5th to 8th grade, and finished at Navy Children School, Delhi from 9th to 12th.

Delhi is technically where I'm from, but I've only lived there for around five years in total. That sentence explains my childhood better than a neat hometown label ever could.

The academic milestones:

• Class 10, CBSE, Navy Children School, Delhi. 91% in 2019, passed with distinction.

• Class 12, CBSE, Navy Children School, Delhi. 92% in 2021, with Maths, Physics and Chemistry as the core science subjects.

Undergraduate studies

I did my BTech in Computer Science Engineering, with a specialisation in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, at Vellore Institute of Technology, Chennai, from 2021 to 2025.

I'd been into computers long before VIT. College is where I committed to it as a career. I went from being broadly interested in computers and tech to working with machine learning, computer vision, data systems and robotics, and treating software engineering as a craft.

The specialisation taught me to think in terms of systems that sense, process, decide and act. That still shows up in my work, whether it's scientific ML at A*STAR, computer vision at CR3ATE.AI, or tooling built around whichever coding agent I'm into lately.

Alongside my degree, I completed two certifications:

• Advanced C, C++ and Python Training, by the Spoken Tutorial Project at IIT Bombay.
• Flutter And Dart - The Complete Guide [2023 Edition], by Academind / Maximilian Schwarzmuller on Udemy.

What moving around taught me

The academic record is one part of the story. The bigger part is that changing schools forced me to adapt fast.

When you keep entering new places, you either learn to connect with people or you stay uncomfortable. I learned to connect. Speaking in public, reading a room, joining a team that already exists and being the new person were survival skills first and strengths later.

That has probably helped me as much as the degree. Research teams, internships, new codebases, new cities. I'm used to walking into something unfamiliar and finding my footing.