The First Job Offer

I barely scraped by in my first year, managing to keep my scholarship with a 6 GPA. But let's be real, I was terrible at programming. I just didn't care about it. That was until the summer break after my first year, when I decided to give programming another shot.

I enrolled in an Introduction to Programming course on Coursera, and it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The course was amazing - each program I wrote had a real-world application, like converting colored photos to grayscale. After that, I dove into HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and I was hooked. I discovered I had a creative streak, and I started building web pages and apps that I was actually proud of.

Over the next two years, I became a web development rockstar (I learned the MERN stack), and I even dabbled in data science and machine learning. In my third year, I led the website team for my college's annual festival and nailed it. I also built an awesome IoT project that won top honors among my batch, and I even published a research paper in an IEEE conference - a huge deal for an undergrad in India.

Despite my mediocre grades, I knew I was on the right track. I told my dad not to worry about my grades, that I knew what I was doing, and that I'd land a job offer that paid more than INR 12 LPA.

August 2018

As I stepped into my senior year of undergrad, the campus was buzzing with companies vying for top talent. Despite being decent at building cool stuff with code, I knew I wasn't exactly the competitive programming type. In India, most firms hiring software engineers look for skills in Competitive Programming and Data Structures and Algorithms (DSA) - it's the quickest way to filter out the best coders from a sea of students. While I loved building things with code, competitive coding just didn't get me excited.

The first company to roll into our campus was Goldman Sachs, offering a whopping ₹3.2m ($45k) total compensation. Unfortunately, I didn't make the cut for the interviews. Next up was Dell, which hosted a hackathon to recruit top talent. My team and I built an impressive web store with an expected delivery date prediction system using Machine Learning. We were proud of our work, but lady luck wasn't on our side - we presented last, and the judges had already filled their quota. I was gutted, but looking back, I'm glad it didn't work out. It was just the universe's way of saying, "Something better is coming your way!"

Fast forward to September 2018, American Express arrived on campus with an internship-linked full-time employment offer. The selection process was grueling - an online assessment with computer science fundamentals and two coding questions, followed by three rounds of interviews at their Gurugram office. I walked into the Amex office for my interviews, and that's when it hit me - I had to get this job. The energy, the vibe, everything about the place felt right.

After three rounds of intense questioning, I left the office feeling a bit deflated, thinking I'd messed up the behavioral part of the final round with a director. But then, the email arrived, and my heart skipped a beat as I saw my name on the selection list. It was a moment of pure elation!

My internship started in January 2019 and lasted six months. Before I knew it, I was graduating in May 2019 with a 7.03 GPA, and among the top 10% job offers of my batch. And, I'd already secured a full-time job at American Express. It was a great way to start my career, and I felt relieved to have it all come together.