I studied in Mangalore my entire life. I was born and brought up there, and until seventh grade, I attended a CBSE school.
In seventh grade, I realized that the traditional school structure was becoming difficult to balance with the extracurriculars I wanted to pursue. I had a lot of interests outside the classroom, and managing those alongside a full school schedule was becoming increasingly difficult. So I decided to begin homeschooling.
From seventh through tenth grade, I essentially taught myself. I was registered with a homeschooling programme in the UK called Wolsey Hall, Oxford. There were no classes or teachers. They sent me textbooks and a syllabus, gave me the order in which I was supposed to study the material, and I taught myself.
An IGCSE school opened in Mangalore when I was in eleventh grade, so I became affiliated with The Bharath Academy for Grades 11 and 12.
That unconventional academic background became an important part of my university application.
Learning to explain an unconventional academic path
When I started applying to universities, I had to make sure admissions officers understood why my academic record looked different from that of a traditional student.
My IGCSE results were five As and two Bs. For my AS Levels, I worked extremely hard and received three As, which my counsellor considered a strong upward trajectory. My predicted grades were AAA*.
My twelfth-grade results were not as important in the admissions process because, in the United States, twelfth-grade results generally come after the Common Application has already been submitted. They are still evaluated, but they are not what colleges primarily use to make the initial admissions decision.
That meant my application was largely about demonstrating the academic trajectory I had already established.
It also meant that I had to be very clear about my homeschooling experience and why my educational path looked different from what an admissions officer might normally expect.
My biggest lesson from this was that if there is something unusual about your academic background, explain it clearly rather than assuming admissions officers will understand it automatically.
I thought I was going to study journalism
One of the strangest parts of my application is that electrical engineering was nowhere near my original plan.
Until tenth grade, I wanted to study journalism, literature, and the arts. I wrote and published my own novel, and many of my extracurricular activities were related to writing, journalism, and the arts.
Then I changed direction.
About two months before my IGCSE exams, I realized that if I wanted to keep my options open for university, I needed to take some STEM subjects. I decided to take physics and chemistry even though I had not been studying them previously.
It was a very sudden change.
I went from being someone whose academic and extracurricular profile was heavily focused on writing and literature to someone applying to study engineering.
That meant I needed to demonstrate that my interest in STEM was genuine rather than something I had suddenly added to my application because I thought it would look impressive.
The first major thing I did was research.
A teacher who had moved from CERN approached the school, and I reached out to him about conducting research. That became one of the most important STEM experiences I had.
I did not have a perfectly constructed four-year engineering profile.
I had changed my mind.
And I had to show colleges that the change was real.
Why I chose UW-Madison over UIUC
When I was deciding between the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the choice was not simply about rankings.
UIUC is an excellent engineering school, and I knew that it had a particularly strong engineering programme. But I was also thinking about flexibility.
At UIUC, if you want to change your major, you can do so after your first year, and the change process is completed through the university.
At UW-Madison, I had more flexibility during the beginning of my degree. I could change my major at any point during my first two years.
That mattered to me because I had already changed my mind once.
I did not want to feel like I had to know exactly what I wanted to do at eighteen.
I also realized that I already loved writing and reading. I knew I would continue doing those things regardless of whether I had a formal degree in them.
If I eventually decided that I wanted academic training in the humanities, I could potentially pursue a second major.
Right now, I am considering combining electrical engineering with another field, potentially philosophy or mathematics.
The flexibility of the American university system was therefore one of the biggest factors in my decision.
My advice to students who are unsure about their degree is simple: do not assume that your first choice has to define the rest of your life.
When comparing American universities, look beyond rankings and ask how easy it actually is to explore different academic fields.
The reality of a large public university
One of the biggest things I did not understand before coming to the United States was how different the experience at a large public university could be from what I imagined.
UW-Madison has a lot going for it. The course structure has good breadth and depth, and the academic rigor is strong.
But there is also a lot of independence.
At a large public university, you have to advocate for yourself. If you need help, you can usually get it if you ask for it. The challenge is that there can be a huge number of students competing for the same professor's time.
I once had a question about a class and went to my professor's office hours. Around 100 students were waiting.
I waited for four hours.
Even after those four hours, the professor had only gotten through around 75% of the line before she had to leave to do other work.
Experiences like that taught me something practical: if you know you are going to need your professor's help before an exam, do not wait until exam week to go to office hours.
Plan.
During exam week, everyone is going to need help at the same time, and professors can only help so many students in a day.
That is one of the differences between being a student at a large public university and being in a smaller academic environment. You have to take more responsibility for managing your own time, getting help and making sure you are not leaving important questions until the last minute.
Public versus private universities
Another thing I have learned from being in the United States is how different large public universities can feel from smaller private universities.
I am currently spending the summer at Caltech for an internship, and one of the biggest differences I noticed was class size.
I asked someone what the smallest class they had taken was, expecting them to say ten or fifteen students.
They said it was one student.
My smallest class at UW-Madison can have around 200 students.
It is difficult to build the same relationship with a professor in a class of 200 that you can build in a class of one.
That does not necessarily mean that private universities are better.
It depends on what you want.
At a large public university, you can have a huge student community, a lot of independence, and an enormous range of opportunities. But you also have to be much more proactive.
At a smaller private university, you may receive more individual attention and have easier access to professors.
There is also a significant financial difference. Public universities can be substantially less expensive than private universities, particularly when it comes to tuition.
So when choosing between universities, I would not just ask, “Which one is ranked higher?”
I would ask:
How do I learn best? How much independence do I want? How much interaction do I want with professors? And what kind of university environment will actually work for me?
What I wish I had known
If I could go back to when I was applying, I would tell myself that the “perfect applicant” does not exist.
My application did not have a straight line.
I was homeschooled for much of secondary school. I did not follow a conventional academic structure. I went from wanting to study journalism and literature to pursuing electrical engineering. My extracurricular profile had originally been heavily focused on writing and the arts before I shifted towards STEM.
My academic path made sense to me, but I knew it might not immediately make sense to someone reading my application.
That is why I think one of the most important things you can do as an applicant is tell the story behind your application.
If your academic path is unconventional, explain it.
If your interests changed, explain why.
If you discovered a new field later than other students, show admissions officers what you have actually done to explore it.
You do not need to pretend that your path was perfectly planned from the beginning.
Sometimes, the fact that you changed direction is part of what makes your story interesting.
For me, the journey from homeschooling to electrical engineering was not a straight line.
It was a process of figuring out what I actually wanted to study and choosing a university that would give me enough flexibility to keep figuring that out.
