Banner image

I am honored to have been selected as a J.N. Tata Scholar! Established in 1892 by J.N. Tata, the founder of the Tata Group, this merit-based endowment fund is old and prestigious.

My application journey itself is a story of grit and determination. There are three stages to the application:

  1. Application Form and Essays
  2. Online Exam
  3. Interview

Application Form and Essays

As this is a loan scholarship, I had to provide names and details of guarantors and local reference (apart from the academic references). For the essays, I gave the same motivations as my statement of purpose.

Online Exam

The Online Exam day marked the day that I flew to Bangalore for the first time to physically work at Goldman Sachs. Until then I worked remotely since Jul 2021. The unlucky thing is that the exam was in the same slot as my flight duration. After several requests, they allowed me to begin the exam 30 minutes later. This wasn’t enough time to reach my PG accomodation. Before flying there, I checked my options like Starbucks and other Wi-Fi hotspots in the Bangalore Airport. I had a mental map of the airport and multiple fallback options.

On landing, I collected my luggage as soon as it appeared on the baggage carousel. After walking some distance, I found what looked like the perfect location — a chair and desk with an electric plug point. There were two baggage carousels right in front of it. These flights had not landed so this region of the airport was nearly deserted.

I set up my laptop and I was ready to start the examination when it struck me. What does a man with a laptop sitting at a chair and desk in the middle of the airport look like? So I wrote in big block letters: “NOT HELPDESK. GIVING AN EXAM.” And it paid out! My exam had video monitoring, so I couldn’t talk during the exam. Each time a flight landed, a flurry of travellers would come up to me with questions. I would point to my signage and they seemed to understand. A pair of perhaps short-sighted old women stared for a long time at my signage until they understood.

So that’s my story of giving the J.N. Online Exam at the helpdesk of Bangalore’s Kempegowda International Airport.

Interview

My interview was with Mr. T J Ravishankar and a professor from IIT Mandi. I thoroughly enjoyed the interview. Unlike in the Narotam interview, the technical questions were exactly from the field of robotics. They asked about quadruped robots, Denavit-Hartenburg conventions, and completeness of search algorithms. Mr. T J Ravishankar even asked me questions about my finance job at Goldman Sachs. He was quite impressed that with all my technical background, my work was so deeply embedded in finance. And more impressed about my motivation to leave all this behind and pursue a career in robotics.