Mystory@Arulmozhi: How I chose my course and career path

The first year of Engineering for a student from a Tamil medium school is terrible. I loved subjects like Physics and Chemistry a lot, but even with my great curiosity, I couldn’t score good grades. However, I was blessed with friends who knew about my knowledge and enthusiasm. They helped me improve my English. I cleared all my papers with good grades and got a chance to establish myself with various competitions in the 2 years here. I bumped into advanced technologies and started attending national competitions. I collected data from rural farmers when I started my final year project, however, at that time I had done 18 projects and 7 national competitions. In the final year, along with my professor, I started helping students in developing projects and started teaching robotics/advanced electronics and power electronics.

I ended up becoming an engineer with a 7.5 CGPA and procuring 3 appointment letters. Thanks to the almighty, I applied engineering in every one of my moves up until a point where people started calling me a geek.

My dream is to become a physicist. Electrical is a great choice and I loved it too. My thoughts towards the subjects are like questioning the color of Boson. Many of the lecturers started to hate me for this questioning sense. Einstein’s words "Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish" kept me inspired.

I started studying the cutting-edge innovations of the 5 units of every subject, so that if a person teaches you the basics of those, it’s like Jerry with a houseful of cheese. I came up with shortcuts to teach my friends and got interested in teaching people the technology. Now, I am a systems engineer and I still remember the day I took the session in data structure. It is used when we have an outage in the network. I could see the data flow and the reason why it failed to move. RCA (root cause analysis) is an interesting thing that can be done by understanding the basics of each technology. I utilized engineering and now the organisation is paying me to apply those.

What I learnt from my job experiences

Behind every great dream, there will be a big wall called family economy. Since my dream field did not provide sufficient funds, I jumped into IT. Once my ethics professor said, "If you can't say no to any situation then only will you be called an engineer".

Learn to say the words "I don’t know", which will teach you a lot that ego does not. As a follower of Nikola Tesla, I would say, innovate and be humble.

I said yes to all the opportunities that came towards me and every company had its own requirements. Finally, I joined a job with a very low salary, even lower than my dream field, but I was able to imagine and calculate my future salary.

After a couple of years, I got a job in a famous MNC but joined a contractor. I did my best, made many mistakes and was scolded by the manager. My engineering mind started RCA-ing all the issues, but they didn’t want RCA, rather quick solutions.

They planned to promote me to a better position with a small hike in the salary. Suddenly, I attended an interview in another MNC and joined as a permanent employee. Now, I am working at a client site with appreciation and a 100% salary hike from my previous package.

Every day, my engineering degree is required to resolve the issues. So I am growing mentally. I hope.

Learn to teach, teach to develop, develop to impress and impress to change the society. This is my ideology. Once my close friend said, "Never ever change your attitude for anything or anyone, since there is a crew of people who kept you as their inspiration," so I am careful about my thoughts at every step.

About the Author:

I am Arul, a poor milk vendor’s son who has seen the world from a different angle. People called me names, but actually, I am a student of this universe. I did my graduation from Karpaga Vinayaga College of Engineering and Technology, Chengalpattu.