‘I gave up studying abroad and chose IIT Hyderabad instead’ | Life in an IIT

I have been living away from home since I was 12 years old. My father, who is a school headmaster in Kundalwadi, Nanded, sent me to Udgir in Latur district after Class 6 for better opportunities. I moved into a hostel, learned to manage on my own, and have largely been doing that ever since, through BTech, through work, through IIT, and now in Tokyo. When people ask how I adjusted to hostel life at IIT Hyderabad, I tell them I had been practising for 16 years.

I am 28, from a small town in Nanded district in Maharashtra. What brought me to IIT Hyderabad was not a straight road; it went through a government engineering college, a game development startup, three years at PwC, and a plan to study abroad that fell apart at the last moment.

I studied at the Zilla Parishad School in Kundalwadi, then moved to Shyamlal Memorial High School in Udgir for SSC, and stayed in Latur for Class 11 and 12 before getting into Government College of Engineering, Karad, for my BTech in Information Technology. My mother is a homemaker, and my father has spent his career in education. I have always felt the weight of what they put into sending me out of the village at twelve, the logistics, the cost, the worry.

Getting into game development

At GCE Karad, I started teaching myself game development through documentation, YouTube, and online courses, whatever I could find. In 2019, I published my first game on the Google Play Store. I was quite introverted at the time, and I noticed that most students around me had had little exposure to gaming, AR, or VR, so I started a game development club to teach juniors and create awareness. What I got out of it was more than I gave; it pulled me out of the shell I had been living in.

I interned at GameEon Studios and later at CHRP India in Hyderabad, where I built VR safety training simulations. For four months, I also worked as a teaching assistant at Coding Ninjas from 10 pm to midnight, helping around 650 students with doubts on Java and data structures. I was still a student. Sleep was optional.

In June 2021, while in my final year, I co-founded Holofuse Technologies LLP with someone I had connected with on LinkedIn. We built games and apps, delivered client projects, and ran the company lean with a small team. A few months in, we agreed we needed more corporate experience before returning to entrepreneurship. Holofuse is dormant today. What it taught me is not.

After my BTech, I joined PwC as an associate in the Software Engineering and Innovation team, working as a backend engineer. It was my first real experience of large-scale corporate infrastructure, how enterprise technology actually gets built and maintained. I spent nearly three years there. It was solid, stable, and good preparation for everything that came after. But something in me was still looking for a next step.

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I had wanted to study abroad since my second year of BTech. I appeared for the IELTS and the GRE, applied widely, and received admits from universities in several countries. The finances were arranged. And then, for personal reasons I will not go into here, I could not go. It was a difficult period.

Why adjusting was not difficult

While looking for options in India, I came across the MTech in Techno-Entrepreneurship at IIT Hyderabad, one of the first full-fledged programmes of its kind in the country. It sat at exactly the intersection I had been navigating since my BTech: technology and building things, combined with a structured understanding of entrepreneurship. I applied. I got in. I deferred the question of going abroad.

I joined IITH in July 2024. Adjusting was not difficult, not after 16 years of hostel life. What I had not expected was the batch: 19 students from 11 different states, each with a different professional background and a different reason for being there.

The conversations that came out of that mix, inside and outside the classroom, were some of the most useful I have had. I was an assistant manager in the Corporate Reach and Finance team at E-Cell, worked with SPICMACAY promoting Indian classical music, and volunteered with Qurve, the campus LGBTQIA+ club.

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MTech students are in an odd financial position: you have left a job, you are drawing down savings, and asking your parents for money feels like going backwards. I found a way through: I bought phones, mostly iPhones, at discounted rates using credit card offers and resold them to dealers in Delhi for a small margin. It kept me going through the tighter months.

At one point, I hit a genuine low. My savings from PwC were thinning. Friends from work were moving into senior roles, travelling, marking milestones. I felt like I was standing still while everything moved around me. I shared this with my thesis guide, Dr Nakul Parameswar.

He said: “Vikram, do you know how a slingshot works? The more you pull it back, the farther and faster the stone travels. This phase isn’t a setback. It’s the pullback for a bigger leap.” After that conversation, I stopped measuring my progress against other people’s timelines.

Research internship at IITH

For my thesis, I built Defen.do, a gamified cybersecurity platform where people learn by practising, rather than reading. Prof M V Panduranga Rao of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering then offered me a research internship at IITH’s Centre for Cryptography and Cybersecurity to develop it into a full product. I led a team of four interns. What we built includes a cyber range where students can practise, and professors can grade assignments in subjects like network security and Linux in seconds rather than hours. The platform is now being used by the Centre for Cryptography and Cybersecurity and the Department of CSE at IIT Hyderabad.

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Every evening around 5.30, our group would meet at the mess for coffee, walk around the campus with no destination or agenda, and end up at the wet canteen for snacks. Birthdays became dinners outside campus. Some nights ran until morning. I also learned swimming at IITH; I had been meaning to for years. I will count that among the things IIT gave me.

After graduating, I joined DENSO Corporation in Japan through campus placement and have recently moved to Tokyo. Entrepreneurship is not behind me; it is something I carry into whatever I build next.