Career-defining. Life-defining.

India's Polaris Fellowship drew students from 1,000+ colleges across ~500 cities. Ten were selected, each placed with a company for a six-month internship. Mine is Aftershoot, in Delhi.

The number on the poster wasn't the story — the rounds were. Seven of them: a 'why you?' application, a public video with no resume to hide behind, one project taken apart to its trade-offs, and a live DSA round with a LinkedIn engineer. Then three interviews with Aftershoot's VP of People, VP of Engineering, and Director of AI. The last two felt less like a test and more like 'are we building the same thing?' It clicked.

India's biggest space-tech hackathon set the brief: catch halo CMEs, the solar storms that fry satellites and power grids, using only particle data from Aditya-L1. Everyone said you needed magnetometers. We bet two months that you didn't.

Fifty research papers, a custom LSTM, and a 3 AM breakthrough the night before the finale proved the bet right. On stage, we stood beside the four Gaganyaan astronauts, the crew of India's first human spaceflight.