When I was 15, I was the kind of student who thought very carefully before raising her hand in class. Not because I did not have something to say, mostly because I was afraid of saying it wrong. I would work out in my head whether an answer was good enough before committing to it, and by the time I had decided, the moment had usually passed.

I am 21, from Pune , and I am in my fourth year of Chemical Engineering at IIT Gandhinagar. Both my parents are engineers, so in our household, engineering was never an unusual ambition, it was closer to the default. What took longer to figure out was what kind, and what I actually wanted to do with it.

I studied at Pawar Public School in Pune until Class 10, then moved to a CBSE school for Classes 11 and 12. I gave JEE Main and JEE Advanced in 2023. When the time came for JoSAA counselling, I went through the curriculum pages of different departments at different institutes, reading actual course structures rather than going purely by reputation.…