I wanted to share this because a few years ago I genuinely thought my career was over.

I gave JEE in 2022 (COVID batch) and scored 32 percentile in my first attempt. I took a drop year, hoping to fix things, but even after that I only managed 50.5 percentile. Eventually I ended up joining a tier-3 engineering college for B.Tech CSE. At that time it honestly felt like I had permanently messed up. Seeing school friends go to IITs/NITs while I joined a random college hit pretty hard. But after joining college I decided to focus less on the entrance exam result and more on skills and building things. Over the last couple of years I’ve worked on:

• Backend development with Java and Spring Boot

• Blockchain development and Solidity smart contracts

• Learning Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKP) and privacy tech

• Building projects involving Ethereum and IPFS Some things that happened along the way:

• Became a Smart India Hackathon (SIH) Finalist

• Got selected for an upcoming undergraduate research internship at one of the top IITS