I will be graduating from Portland State University in 2018, completing my Master’s in Electrical and Computer Engineering – and I would like to thank Scholar Strategy for enabling me for a journey that I never planned to do.
A little bit of history about myself, I was working as a Software Engineer at Hewlett Packard Enterprise for 2 years and there has been something constant throughout my time there – total dislike for the job and thoughts on how to get out it for good. Nistha played a pivotal role in giving me a launchpad for my dreams – I got 3 admits for my MS in ECE – Portland State University, UT-Dallas and Clemson. I did apply to many highly ranked university, but I didn’t have the combined background, GRE/TOEFL scores and financial capacity to fetch an admit. I was even in a stage where I had to drop my plans because I couldn’t get a student loan, until i could get a small amount that was just sufficient to meet PSU’s I-20 requirement for visa interview.
Fast forward 2 years…I am glad to be graduating with an impressive CGPA, thankful and blessed for 5 Teaching Assistant roles over 4 terms, a Fall Internship with AMD as CPU Verification Engineer, and more importantly 6 full time offers – 3 from Intel, one from Cadence CPU, one from Micron Technology and one from Ampere Computing CPU – all Verification Engineer roles. Along my journey, I did fail at Apple onsite, Google onsite, Intel onsite as well as AMD onsite. I also received calls from NVIDIA and Facebook – All the failures came during Feb-March mid and I had the worst start possible. But the fact that I could reach Apple and Google for their onsite, being from Portland State, was a game changer – the outcome of all failures is disappointing but the confidence it gave me was massive. It made me prepare for what was best for me and I could follow it with many full time offers – and in exactly the same role what I wanted my job to be – in CPU – I could crack interviews by beating candidates from higher ranked universities.
Nistha always said about hard work, believing in your abilities, networking and never giving up – and my experience is a perfect example of her advice.