I completed my B.Tech from BBDNIIT- a tier-III college in Lucknow and post that, I started working in the fin-tech domain at OBOPAY in 2019 as a full stack developer.
Even after completing my graduation and getting placed, I didn’t let my learning halt. Alongside my job, I continued to learn from the internet to increase my technical knowledge. At that time, however, my learning was quite abstract. You know how it is with the internet. With the availability of countless resources, it is difficult to ascertain where to begin and where to stop.
Besides this, while approaching a broader concept I felt that the sub-topics should be learnt in a chronological way such that understanding of one concept lays the foundation ground for the learning of subsequent concepts. For me, learning from the web wasn’t of much help due to the abstractness of content. In this sense, Scaler had an immediate appeal for me as the course was very well-structured with an increasing level of complexity of topics.
When I joined Scaler, I had a pretty hectic job. At multiple times, managing so many things at once would become very difficult. I would find myself being distraught with so much work. As a solution to this, every night, I would mentally plan out the next day such that neither my job nor my learning got compromised. I would set realistic goals in my mind regarding the number of problems I would practice the next day. This helped me a lot. What I tried to steer clear from were ‘zero effort days’. On the days when my schedule would be too hectic, solving even a single problem was satisfactory for me. I mean doing one simple coding problem was better than doing nothing the whole day, right?
Also, since lectures used to be on alternate nights, I would schedule my practice hours accordingly. Sometimes, when the questions were not that complicated, it would hardly take 45-60 minutes to get them done for a day. But when the questions were challenging, the practice time would even stretch to 3-4 hours. I didn’t mind it though as the gratification of solving a challenging problem all by myself was worth it.
Apart from my practice, sessions with my mentor at Scaler – Mr. Shubham, who was working at Samsung in the R & D department, were particularly helpful as I would discuss my growth and progress with him. We would have a lot of mock interviews. Personally, his suggestions helped me in making the right decisions at multiple instances in my journey. For example, even before the course was over, he pushed me to start giving interviews as he felt that I was ready to take a shot at the interviews again. I also feel that his mentorship worked for me because of the space that allowed me to be forthcoming about my problems and hurdles. I mean any person with good knowledge can be a mentor. But a good mentor is the one who creates a safe space for sharing, learning and growing!
With the help of the career team, I gave interviews for Flipkart and Amazon. I got rejected from Flipkart but I didn’t let it pull me down and focussed my attention on preparing for Amazon. But you know how they say- “You can plan all you want but fate paves what it wishes”. The night before my interviews with Amazon, I got measles with high fever. Besides being unwell, the heavy doses of medicines interrupted my concentration levels. I knew that I was in a hazy state, yet I decided to give it a try even if I ended up getting rejected. I gave the interview and surprisingly cleared all the rounds in the morning. I wouldn’t chalk it down to just luck because that was the time when I knew that my hours of practice and hard work had paid off.
For anyone following the same field, I would just recommend you to set your limits on your own. If you let someone else define the limits of success for you, it will do nothing but pressurise you.
I would say even if you are doing a single problem instead of three problems in a day, that is better than pressurising yourself into doing multiple problems.
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