Vaishnavi was a final year student at Amity University, who was on cloud nine after securing a position at FIS, a leading multinational fin-tech company. However, life had other plans. As she eagerly awaited the start of her SWE career, the delay in joining dates at FIS Global left her feeling restless.
But did she let this extra time slip away? Absolutely not! With this additional time on her hands, she thought, "Everyone looks to switch jobs in a year or two, so why not prepare now?" She decided to use this time to prepare for top product-based firms for software engineering roles.
This meant one thing - DSA!
With limited knowledge from her college days and few peers to turn to, she began her search looking for some powerful mentors. And while randomly scrolling through LinkedIn one day, she came across a startup founded by IIIT-H. Was this the big leap she was looking for?
Days flew by, and she even skipped a few gatherings with friends. But it wasn't a sacrifice - she found joy in this world of algorithms, visualizing it like never before. Her approach to complex data structures (like Graphs and Dynamic Programming) transformed, and soon she was solving ACM-ICPC level problems. With this, she soon got an offer from Telestream.
But her journey wasn’t all rosy as it seems, she faced a major setback when she got laid off after a few months. Back to square one, she felt like all her hard work was in vain. But Swapnil Daga, one of the founders at AlgoUniversity, knew how far she'd come. A 1:1 session with Swapnil helped her see that it wasn't her fault, and that her hard work and skills would eventually pay off.
Days and days of endless applications followed. OA rounds, Interviews, and Rejections (in last rounds) continued. She faced questions about her gap year in each of these interviews and felt like giving up several times. And then, she finally landed an offer from a leading product-based company - Ramco!
The interview process went super well. Her experience with L4 level projects helped immensely during her interviews. And DSA, her strong suit, shined all the way (even leading her colleagues to ask how she was able to solve the last questions that none of the others did : P ).
Now, she's thrilled to be part of the AI and ML team at Ramco, where she's working on LLM and lots of exciting stuff too! Fun fact: Being the only one in her team with deployment experience, she’s the go-to person for anything related to deployment, thanks to her projects at AlgoUniversity!
Her journey in tech is just beginning, and we can’t wait to see what comes next!