How To Build A Strong Profile For Masters In USA - w/ Akshansh

I was planning to study abroad not today but at least two to three years down the line. What kind of a seat should I plan today which I can really benefit from two to three years down the line? To write out the bad, the following is what you need to get your house in order first. My college is not as good as IITs. So does my eight-pointer have the same weightage as another student from IIT having eight point or seven pointer? I'm Naman Pandit, this is the ReadySet to Podcast and in this episode featured not expert is... well it's me. Allow me to explain.

Mine a few Akshans who has been a past featured not expert on this podcast asks me questions around how he can walk a path similar to the one I walked. Before I started my masters in the US about five years ago from Purdue University, before moving to Chicago for work which I've been doing and living here for the past three years. Why should someone spend so much of work hard enough to go abroad and study? How is it different? What does it teach you? First of all it won't matter once you're here to looking for jobs. The last thing on your mind will be to find a job that you actually love. You need to have a lot of research background for your masters abroad. It's hard for me to recommend any other country other than America when it comes to higher education. Primarily

just because of the ROI, a good SOP but SOP is going to be pretty much similar to all the other ones. That's not necessarily true. I know for the fact my SOP at Purdue was unlike any other SOP that was submitted. In line with a theme of learning from somebody that's just two steps ahead of us instead of an expert. My goal with this episode is to help any engineering student in India figure out the exact steps that they can start taking while they're still in college to bolster their chances of landing and admit at a decent American masters program. How would you suggest someone could properly analyze themselves and figure out what best suits them? Subscribe on YouTube and any of your favorite podcast apps for weekly episodes featuring not experts and daily clips

from those episodes on Instagram and YouTube. And now without any further ado, here's me I guess another challenge. Welcome to the Ready Set Do podcast where we learn from journeys of not experts who are just two steps ahead of us. Hello guys welcome back to another episode of Ready Set Do. But this time we have swapped the host. I'm going to host this show and right now we have our next dot expert because he's just few steps ahead of me. My own name is Naman Pandey. Hello Naman. How does it feel to be on the other side of the mic? It's great to be here. What a great introduction that I'm just speechless. Today's topic is going to be how someone like me and obviously millions of students in our country who are studying in probability year two, three or

even tier one colleges in our country. So I'm from Kent University which is based off of Orissa Pavaneshwar. And I was planning to study abroad not today but at least two to three years down the line. So a obvious question arises in the mind that what should me as a student do or what kind of a seed should I plant today which I can probably read benefits from two to three years down the line. For that I did not have anyone else better than my own uncle who is pursuing who has already pursued his masters in engineering from Purdue University, a really esteemed one from America.

In fact, Neil Armstrong, we all know Neil Armstrong. He was from there. He said he and graduated. I think work from there. Something he was related to. So what can I do personally right now? Probably in terms of getting good connections and networking with teachers from esteemed universities, big NIT, big international universities to get good LORs. So can you let's let's just start off with what are the things you would say are the most valuable or key bullet points of a profile of a student which these universities beat public or Ivy League even better.

What are the things they look for? Yeah, so I think right off the bat the following is what you need to get your house in order first. So obviously it starts with, as you said, your letter of recommendations and your statement of purpose. Those are important. Typically you need three letters of recommendations and it should span not just one segment of your career or life, but it should span like the entire circle. So if you went to college, hopefully you went to college, you will have a couple from professors that hopefully have good research background. They are known internationally in on some level at least. And separately from your work X, it can be your manager. It can be your skip level manager. Really just people that you work with. Now a lot a very common mistake

that people make here is they'll go they'll go and get an LOR with somebody that would have known them for two weeks. Now that's great if that person has you know good credentials. But if you're reading that as an admissions committee, you already know that how much can you really know about a person in two weeks. And then when they read stuff like oh he was so great, he did this, he did that whatever he changed my life. It just rings hollow a little bit because really what realistically what could somebody have done in two weeks that is making you go all gaga over them.

But anyway, it's coming back SOP LORs. You need your GRE. Now actually let me quickly pause here and say that this everything I'm going to share here is based is based on my perception of things that I've seen in my own career as well as my friends and just my worldview in America. You can always poke holes in stuff that I say I'm like I was going to say that you should definitely take the GRE. Now there's a whole swath of people that will say that except it's not required.

Most universities have waived off GRE requirements. Whether or I know that what I'm still saying you should make it. I did not even know that. Yeah, so universities are not using GRE for their short testing now. They have waived it off. So what that means is that it's not mandatory anymore for you to have taken the GRE for sure. However, if you have a profile like you do and that I did, my profile was spot on bang average, not saying yours is also. But yeah, I did not have a special profile. I did not have anything going for me. So I could have applied without a GRE but why would I do that? When it comes to people like us, you know, students like us that don't have 10 on 10 GPAs, don't have like three years of work ex at like Samsung or Apple or one of the man

companies in the world, it simply boils down to a game of how can you differentiate your profile. So just think about it, right? If a hundred students such as you and me are applying with the exact same profile, we like the same generic crap in our SOPs. All of our LOSs are the same. What separates you from those 99 other people? Now in my mind, something that can potentially is the GRE. So anyway, I'll continue and we can deep dive into all of these things as we go, right?

But yeah, so where was I SOP LOS GRE? Your GPA is extremely important. There are colleges. A few colleges in the U.S. that are heavily waiting towards GPA. University of Southern California is one of those colleges. If you have a sub or a higher GPA than nine out of 10, in India, which becomes to around 3.8 something out of four because you have to convert it to four scale for the U.S., you are automatically getting it. As in, I don't want to say automatically getting it, but the odds are in your favor now. Even if you have no work X, even if you have no projects, everything else is just like baseline. But with a really good GPA, that particular college will take you or will favor you at least. And there are other colleges like that, this graph.

So that's your weight gain. So regarding the GPA, there's this surrounding doubt in most of TA2, TA3 college students that my college is not as good as IITs. So does my supposed eight-pointer or nine-pointer have the same weightage as another student from IIT having eight-point or seven-pointer? It does, because the way it works is you will have to convert irrespective of whether you went to IIT or KIT. You have to convert your GPA to a four-point scale. If there is an algorithm that does that, there is also a paid service that does that. I didn't use that. I just did it myself.

And so, yeah, it becomes normalized and it becomes out of four at the end of the day. So it doesn't matter what your GPA was. Well, that matters. But it doesn't matter where your GPA was gotten from, because at the end of the day, everything gets normalized to a school of four. So Tony's like, college is sort out for higher tier bachelor's students. So if I was supposed sitting out of five profiles, I have a profile from KIT and I have a nine-pointer. Whereas someone from IIT, let's say Delhi or something, has an amazing eight-point two or something. And it is considered that IITs have a much stricter checking process and examination. So don't you think they are going to get an edge or something? I'm not sure of it. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, they will for

sure get an edge. There is no doubt about that. Right? Sure. They will have an advantage with this. What is a safe GPA for a tier three or tier two college student to be able to compete against a tier once? So yeah, I would encourage you to not think about it that way, because like I said, just your GPA in isolation doesn't mean anything. It's it all rounds back to your entire profile. It's like that entire circle. It's like the 360 that you get judged on. And your GPA is just one aspect of it. Having said that, if everything else is the same, and if you are competing, like, I guess, yeah, an eight point five is solid everywhere, whether you went to IID, NID, or any private college. If you have anything post eight point five, chances are that that

will not be the reason for your rejection, if that makes sense. No matter what the college is, like from no history, exactly. Yeah, that's exactly right. Yep. So anyway, going back down my list, we were at SOP, LOR, GRE, GPA. Oh, yeah, that's it. Actually, those are, I mean, there are other stuff like doing projects, work experience. Work experience is a big, big pillar on that list, but some people like to go straight out of college, which I would not advise if I, if we were to talk about that. But work experience is a huge factor. So like, say you have subpar, GRE, everything else, but you have four or five years of work X, colleges do prefer you over the others in that case, if you have a high, a high amount of work experience. And so let's say, so firstly, I have

this stout. Okay, most of us think of like, you're going to do backsters over here, and then we're going to pressure master abroad. What is the master's abroad? Like, how does it feel? Like, how is it different from what you are studying in India? Why should someone, you know, spend so much hard enough to go abroad and study? What is it that they're gaining out from that? And how does it, how is it different? What teach, what does it teach you? Basically, give me a feel of it because people can say that, why don't you just give a gate and crack some IITs and study with that. And I have also checked this that the NIRF ranking for IITs is much lower than an Ivy League outside. So what different are they doing, which gives them such amazing rankings?

So even if we remove for a second, the whole question of education, method of teaching, you know, cohort, whatever the case might be, even if we remove all of that, there, I'm getting like a disturbance from your end. Is somebody like slamming something in that room? No, they say, okay, okay, yeah. So yeah, you still, yeah, your mic is doing a great job picking up every single movement or every single noise that is there. But that's okay. So yeah, anyway, coming back. So the biggest reason why most people do it easily, right, easily is, it's just a ticket to the US job market. We'll just say US for now, the same applies for Europe, Australia, wherever you go. But the US just makes the most sense because that's the most ROI that you can get compared to salaries in the Europe, salaries in UK, salaries in Australia, anywhere

you might go. There is no competition when it comes to the ROI because your median salary in just any tech role is still a six-figure number. If not six-figure, it's close to there, right? So even if you get $90,000 per year, you can just imagine that compared to whatever salary you might be getting after a gate for which you have to risk it all, go up against millions of people and still you aren't even guaranteed a spot. In this case, really a master's abroad. And I'm not saying this is the mentality you should adopt. I'm just sharing from what I've learned from people.

Some of this I also personally agree with as well, but it's literally just a ticket to the job market abroad. That's all it is. Now, continuing down that path, there are two lines or two, there is a fork in the road that people have to, you know, have their come to Jesus moment with, which is that first, do you want to take actually challenging courses and push yourself in various ways, right? That's step one. Step two, however, is what if you just took the most bare bones, basic courses that you can get away with and you can still graduate. And at the end of it all, you will also still be eligible same as the other person for the US job market. So do you want to spend your time in college learning what the teacher teaches you or separately upskilling yourself

for stuff that will be useful when you start applying for jobs. So I cannot recommend anything that just it's just subjective, right? It depends on what you want to do. But hopefully at least part of that answers the why, why should one consider doing this? This is why it's just a straight short ticket to what I consider for most people in India, at least generational wealth. This is how I would put it. Now, if you were to, you know, put a gun to my head and be like, you have to actually want to study fine. If we are going down that path, there are projects every week. I remember one of my courses involved a reading that you had to do before you came to class every week. And this was like a long, I mean, not long, but eight, nine pages worth of information,

like case studies, essentially. And the whole class was just a discussion of what you had read. So now as you can imagine, if you hadn't read anything, if you just show up to college like we do, or I used to in India, you would not even have the remotest inkling of what everybody is talking about, right? It's like a joke that everybody is in on other than you. Similarly for the engineering courses and just for context, I studied engineering management. So I got the flavor of both the business school as well as engineering school in the US. So engineering school is also really the same.

Like there are assignments every week, pretty much. There is your final exam maximum has a weightage of 40% never more than that. Everything else comes through stuff that you do recordingly through the course of the semester. So you cannot, you just simply cannot like the infrastructure isn't even there for you to show up just for your midterms, second midterms, final exam and done, right? Keep that doesn't exist. Like you have to be locked in the whole time, because if you're not, then you're going to fail. And credits cost a lot. Each subject is roughly about 4,000 US dollars that comes out to a decent amount of money, right? So if you have to retake that, the odds are stacked against your favor. You don't want to do that. So I don't know if that answers your question,

but I'd like to pause and see if that made any sense. Yeah, that makes absolute sense. So, and also while you were saying that this different approach to learning that they take probably the one where you have to be fully immersed with the course throughout the year, that is definitely pretty different than what experience I had starting in my college in KIT, because we obviously had it much easier because we had a bit of a study group before midterms, then enzymes and these two exams basically decided our GPA and that's all we cared about. And interestingly, I spoke similar thing about the study experience with Abhijachu, and he also said that his major study is the part where he very actually learned and enjoyed versus MBA in IAM. And he said that there also they had

this case study based learning where they had open book, laptop, everything given, but still they couldn't score amazing in tests because it was all based on learning and probably the perspective of the thinking that they used in there throughout the course. So is that somewhere remotely similar to what America is doing based on of education system and how is it? So, which one will be more feasible for a student to do? Probably set for CAD, prepare for MBA, set for IAM, and all two engineering management which you did abroad. Or is it completely different? Am I taking it all wrong? No, you're not. It's just a slightly tricky question to answer because it boils down to what you are good at, right? So, I'll just talk about myself just because I'm most equipped to do that.

In my case, it was about a year that I was working at PWC after my undergrad. And I was faced with a simple choice. You will also be faced with that same choice. Most general engineering males in India faced the same choice. You either go for the gate or you go for the cat or you go for the GRE, like, I mean, maybe you could find other options. I don't think any other option is really that feasible. But I'm sure if you were to really, you know, go after that, there is other stuff you could do. But for the most part, I would say those three are your major parts. Now, for gate, I had no interest in the MIMs. G-men and GRE are interchangeable.

Internet or cow care, tell me where me. Yeah, the net just went off and came back. I was also mentioning that there is GMAT, which is, I think, management. Yeah, management is the same. GMAT is the same as GRE. If you are preparing for the GRE, you will do pretty well on the GMAT. Like, they're very similar. There's not a lot of difference. So, sure, like, we can bucket GRE and GMAT under the same umbrella. So, yeah, those three options. Now, for gate, first three, I had no interest in higher technical education. I just didn't like programming or coding or research or just studying more about that at all in any way, shape, size, or form. So, I knew that would suck. And also, even if I were to do that, for what? You get two more LPA's than your bachelor's who then

mock you by showing you their offered letters. So, what is the point of that, right? And then, secondly, Kat, as we know, just the competition of it. And I'll get to this and I'll get to why this makes more sense for me. But just growing up based on my profile, just as a rule of life, you always want to be playing games that you are good at. You always want to embrace the competition where you have an inherent edge. I would say that is at least my philosophy in life.

I have been really good in English my whole life. It's something that I'm passionate about. For whatever reason, in school, it was really just a way for me to get more marks because we all got 100 in school. So, like, how am I coming first here? So, that was my competitive advantage to go above and beyond and learn English so I can write essays that no one else was writing. Write phrases from random video games that I was playing that no one else was even able to think of, right? And I kind of carried that forward with me. And then I realized at the stage that I am equipped for the GRE, I am going to crush this exam because everybody struggles with the English part. I am good at that already. So, it's not even like an actual problem. And then, separately for the maths, it's so easy. I mean, it's not easy. It just takes practice.

So, it was between playing a game that I am equipped that I know I am going to be good at versus going up against, like, I don't know, 6 million people or whatever the latest figure is. Why? Like, what sense does it make for me to do that? So, that was it for me. So, and then, yeah, to your actual question now, business education largely around the world is the same. They like to teach via case studies. I have my criticisms of that, but that is a conversation for another day. It is fun though. For what it's worth, it does feel more immersive than just reading a textbook where somebody explains to you what NPV is versus you struggling along with a company who was facing that problem. And as you, you know, talk through what it is that they were doing.

So, yeah, I feel like we've kind of come a little bit far from the original premise here. Do you want to ask any questions around actually what you could be doing with all of this in mind? Or, yeah, what were you thinking? Yeah. So, I would quickly like to jump onto the next topic, which was pasting a few myths around studying abroad. So, let's just like, just quickly just tell me if it's true or not. I don't know. I don't have many. I have one actually.

I shouldn't name this a segment. It was just once. Yeah, it is. Do you need to have a lot of research background for your master's abroad? Like, if I were to, say, do masters in engineering or whatever, do I need to have a lot of research overloaded or packed? Some thing like a lot of research papers in IEEE, low cons, IEEE, other conferences or something. Yeah. So, the first thing about that is, and I'm glad you brought this up, is step one of even considering starting to plan for study abroad is always, always, always figured out what course you want to study. I would highly recommend that to be the first step. You can circumvent that.

Some people might argue that, you know, don't do that. That's fine. But because you're asking me, I'm going to tell you that has to be step one is figuring out what you want to study. In my case, as I said, I had no interest in higher technical education. So, automatically, that ruled out your master's in machine learning, master's in computer science, master's in electrical, engineering, whatever crap, you know, like you get what I need. Now, for your more techno functional courses, the flagship of which is your engineering management, there is also business analytics, which is very similar. And there's also management of information systems, MIS.

So, all of these are kind of parallel-ish to each other. None of them require to, none of them require research experience. So, you don't need any research because I obviously have no research experience and I was nine, right? So, okay. While you said that, I did have a few questions already written down for you for me to ask. But I just realized that the step one is very important. And I think it's the earlier you realize your step one, that is why, and why you want to do a course abroad and what kind of course you want to do. That is, I think you pointed out correctly so that it is very important to figure out as soon as possible, or else you will be just in a place where you don't really fit in. And you're not playing with the things you're good at.

So, just roughly based off of what you know about me, how would you suggest me to probably explore my own ideologies and figure out what works for me? Or probably, you know, some questions that people can ask themselves to know what they are going to do and what should they do? Where do they have a competitive edge? For instance, I was never a good student in the school life, like throughout the school life. So, I, but I did kind of shine through my college days because it was more of, you know, just getting the assignments done and time, starting before the Mitzvah and Simpson. I finally managed to get back on my feet and figure it out. But I don't know, neither do I share that same interest for machine learning or something like you. I don't have that

interest either. I don't want to go full-fledged deep into that. Like, at least as far as I know about myself right now, I don't know about what happens few weeks down the line. But how would you suggest someone could probably analyze themselves and figure out what best suits them? Because I think because of the preconditioning in the country, because of the preconditioning of the course that we take, that we do, all of us get stuck in this tunnel vision to just, you know, do BTEC, then do masters and tech only. I think they are not able to see where their strengths can lie and where the other opportunities are the courses offered throughout. Like, there's a plethora of courses are being offered abroad than considered in India. India, you have few options to explore

and deep life, which is the most famous ones. And then you are just stuck and confused that, "Oh, I'm not fitting in. I'm not fitting it." So that is where my true question lies that how to figure it out, how to figure out what would work the best for me. Like, just based off of me, you can base me as an example to guide others. Yeah, for sure. And that's a great question. There are multiple levels to this question, which will make sense as I start to answer.

But before we actually kind of talk about that, let's talk about the goal here, right? What is the common goal between you, between me, between anybody that would come here? For the most part, there are always, you know, that 2%. Right. There are always 2% of those people that have enough money. They just actually want to explore stuff. We will ignore them because that's, I don't think that's anywhere close to the majority.

But the reason why I say this is at the end of the day, no matter how far away you run from tech, if you are to get jobs in the US, you will not actually be not in tech. Like your job will 100% have to be in tech for two reasons, right? First being that if you go to a, for a STEM degree, STEM beings of science, technology, engineering and math, that allows you to stay in the US for three years before you have to worry about your S1B lottery and all of those things.

That's one thing. Second thing is just think about it, right? First principles, you're a US company CEO or, you know, people manager or whatever. You're looking at two people that have the same exact skill set that can do the same things. One of them is arguably a better communicator than the other. And I'm referring to the American person and the non-American person. Who would you hire, right? Given for one of them, you have to go through this lottery process.

You have to pay extra money for them to go through that, blah, blah. It's just, and it's just a bunch of extra hurdles that why would you want to take that, right? So unless this person now solves a critical problem for your company that you're having a tough time finding Americans to do, that is where you would be more susceptible to trying to hire them. So before we even start talking about masters in computer science versus engineering management versus business analytics versus MIS or whatever, keep in mind that all roads lead to Rome, right?

No matter how far you run away, last May, up May, he got through. So having said that, now that road itself can look a little different. What I mean with that is a software engineer role, you know, at like Medhav or pick any software organization, their day-to-day job duties differ wildly from, say, my day-to-day job duties. Both of us leverage tech, both of us use code or write code in different capacities. It's just the amount of it, I would say, that is different and also just the amount of interaction that you have to do with other people. Generally, with more software development rules, you are limited in interaction with either your team, which is other developers or your manager, right? In my case, I have to talk to other random people that don't know the first thing about technology that are almost afraid of it most of the time,

and I have to tell them that, hey, my job here is not to, you know, rain on your parade, I'm actually trying to help you. If you will help me do this, I can save you five, six hours every week. And this is why I went into this whole line of work in the first place, right? Because I was writing code at PWC and I hated it. I was just hunched in a corner in the shadows, just writing code. It just, I love technology. It is my life's greatest passion. But I realized pretty early on that, as much as I like technology, I also like helping people with it. And if that link isn't like a strong link that I can follow from one place to another, I'll just lose interest.

You know, I need to be talking to some people here that I'm helping with the technology route. But coming back, what I'm getting at is the question that you can ask yourself is, do you like to be in the shadows writing code? Or do you like to be on the ground in the field, have a third eye, you know, bird's eye view of what's going on and leverage technology still to do other parts of job for a company, right? Because no company ever hires you to write code.

They write you to deliver business, they hire you to deliver business value. You do that by writing code. Now you could also do that by using or leveraging technology to do other things, right? You're not getting nobody's ever paid for writing code. If it doesn't do or bring any, doesn't add any value for the company, if that makes sense. So that is how I would approach this. But yeah, like I said, really want to hone in on the point that even your farthest removed role from tech still involves a lot of tech. So if the goal is to completely go away from tech, maybe, yeah, I don't know what suggestion I would have, like, yeah, then you kind of screw actually.

Yeah, no, no, not definitely not going away from tech completely, because then we will have any topic to talk about because you can't really play both the balls at the same time. So basically what I meant was to be able to identify where you exactly fit in. Like for a long period of time, I did not even understand what you are doing right now, what you personally do as a job as whatever work you are doing. So maybe let's just start with there and give me a hint of how you are, you know, managing to be involved in tech, but also not sit in the shadows because I personally, I might not be the majority of the people watching this video, but I personally feel like that shadow is not the place for me. I love to present myself. I love to talk to people. I have

this good ability to be able to talk to people and get their job done as well as, you know, get my job done. So bringing pleasure to people always up for it and having relations with them, have creating bonds with them, having, enjoying, enjoying socially. I am not a person who hates social interaction. In fact, quite the opposite. So for someone like me who loves to stay outside, be under the spotlight, grasp as much as attention in the room as possible, what would my strengths be? You have seen me grow up in front of you for the most of my life. Yeah. So before I start answering that, I want to share that. First of all, it won't matter. Once you're here, once you're looking for jobs, the last thing on your mind will be to find a job that you actually

love. It is extremely competitive in the market right now. Most people have left what it is that they wanted to do like six months behind them in the time that they then are ready to do whatever comes their way, right? Because they have loans, you have a lot of investment meeting. Like I said, it's all about the ROI, right? And if you don't have a job, your ROI is literally zero. So this, I feel like is a slightly moot question if you ask me very honestly, just because I really lucked out when I when I chose to do my master's, I was not even close to being hell bent on that I want to only do such and such things. I would actually recommend against that because chances are you will not be getting the chance to do that, right? But the way it panned out for me is what I do

currently is I help people automate their jobs within my company, which is a commercial real estate company, the third biggest commercial real estate company in the world. And the way it works is say somebody needs something automated. They will invite me I will go up to them and teach them how to use low code, no code tools with simple drag and drop interfaces such as all tricks. That's one of them, but there's other tools as well. But I use those tools to teach them that if they were copy pasting stuff for five hours every week, well, now they can just click a button and a bot will do that for them. So my job is to help them make that. I don't really even make that for them. And yeah, once that's done, I, you know, eject, eject button and then and then inject it into a new part of the

business. The thing I like about it is, yeah, as I said, right? These are people that do not come from tech that are afraid of it, honestly. And usually by the time that by the time my assignment with them is done, they tell me that they had no idea. This could be so helpful for them and that they really enjoyed not having to do five hours worth of civil share copy basting every week. And instead they can use that time to use their human brain to do human brain stuff, if that makes sense. So you would say your job is more of your love for tech combined with your love for interacting with people. And now you're selling this tech ideas and alternatives to the ones who are not very familiar with that tech, something like that, something around that premise. Yeah. And now considering the fact that tech is growing at such a high pace,

do you think jobs like yours would be there when we are going to, you know, we are going to get a job? Do we have enough scope to get into your field? Because I think they are already hiring someone like you already right now as we speak. So five years down the line, probably they have all hired it out. So will there be needs for more of use to be hired? There will be. Yeah. There is always a need for people that understand tech that come from tech that are able to communicate using tech and about tech. There was never a day where there is no market for these people. So if the deeper you understand about it, it is the best for your job. Understand about that. And also for any tech job. Yeah. And and also for any job rule, right? Like even if you are writing machine learning code at Adobe, you still need to be

able to communicate about tech. Like you wouldn't have a job if you were not able to do that. So it is yeah, it is an extremely critical skill to have for sure. And given the question about figuring out what works best for you, unfortunately, there is no miracle to it is what you're saying that you have to probably shoot an arrow in one direction, whichever seems the best to you, and then hope that it lands on the right nearest target or just settle for wherever it lands, something like that. So I wouldn't say settling. The way I like to look at it is just increasing your luck surface area, right? So you can do things that are very objective that physically optimize for the amount of luck surface area that you can have going in your favor. So in my case,

that just looked like keeping my eyes in years open. When in my first year at Purdue, I took a like wide variety of courses. I wasn't restricting myself that this is all I want to do. Like I had project management and like a cognitive design course, both in the same semester, those things are pretty far apart from each other, if you ask me. So that's just kind of what I was doing, keeping all my options open. And then for my internship or co-op, that was for a whole year.

That was my first chance to do what I do currently, actually, which is the turn for that is transformation or digital transformation. And I didn't know the first thing about transformation until I applied for that job or interviewed for that job. I remember googling what it is like a week before my interview because I knew they would ask me. And I did that for a year. And then the things that I did there were exactly the things that my current full-time job needed from me. So while I can sit here and be like, Oh, I plan this my whole life, I was wanting to do transformation, that should be a lie.

I never I couldn't care less about transformation. What I did care about was a having a job, be having a job that I like and see something that fulfills me in that order. So yeah, I mean, that's and that is my recommendation to you as well, right? Like whatever it is that you think you want to do, that's great. Yeah, that's great work towards that. But don't show works yourselves into like a really narrow field. According to me, that doesn't help or you could like the argument or I can absolutely make an argument for you. Fortunately enough, I do not have a shoe box because I don't really I haven't found that the spark or the thing that, you know, I would dedicate my entire life to I'm just enjoying the flow right now. And mostly whichever works

for me, I'm just getting the job done wherever it is needed. So if the company has to say that they have this requirements, I'll probably go and start starting that. So I don't have a set circle BTIM or something, nothing that came across in the field of engineering ever sounded as promising as football to me, where I would leave everything else in this focus on that. So I'm okay with working as far as I'm getting paid. Good enough. That is what I'm going with the mathematics. Do you think that is right though? Like there's a lot of people that come up and say that you should find that that passion in you to do that and this if you're not passionate enough, if you just work for the money, you will never succeed in life and stuff. My take on that is that if that is a take that

only applies if you are working on your own business. If you are working a salary job, which you know is for a finite amount of time, I don't think that is the best advice because you can just suck up and just do the work right. Now if you were to start a business, I would recommend you in that case that please only start a business on something or with something that you're passionate about because that is extremely hard because you have to drive yourself. There is no paycheck driving you in that case. But in this case, because there is a paycheck, I don't necessarily think that is the best advice. But also what do I know? I'm just some guy. Okay, a lot of tough topics discussed. So I would just come on to one another tough topic in fact, not too tough. But

given the conversation you were having before that, if not America, what else then? So I would like to put two questions out there so you can give me a quick short answer to that. Given the entire thing about visas getting canceled for students in America and Trump going a bit rough on them, what are the prospects of higher studies of Indian students in America and if not America what else? It's hard for me to recommend any other country other than America when it comes to higher education, primarily just because of the ROI, right? Because if you look at, let's just look at the UK in comparison. The fees are, there's not a lot of difference in the fees. There's like a 30% difference at max in terms of tuition fees I mean. Now if you're paying basically the same

amount and if one place, so just looking at my example, right? My tuition, my entire tuition for two years was 30,000 USD. That comes out to about like 40 lakh INR. Now an average median job after that course is, we'll just say a hundred thousand dollars. Like you know, I don't even need to do the math for you. Now in the same case for the UK, even if you get away with like say, we'll say it, we'll take the best possible scenario that your case or your course only cost 20,000 pounds, right? But how, what good is that if the highest salary you can or will even just, we should take median, right? The median is still around like 50 to 60,000 pounds.

So it's almost half there in terms of what you could be making and also what you make just in terms of taxes and such, you, you left it nothing. You like, you left it peanuts. Like you could argue that sure you have a better quality of life compared to India, but I find that to not be an apples to apples because you should be comparing not to India, but to your opportunity cost, which is the highest amount of money that you could have made.

And the fact remains, at least looking at everything that we know as of recording today at on 8th May 2025, that we are not going to see certain skyrocketing in salaries in the UK, Europe, Australia, wherever you go, Canada, right? It's not going to change. Now as far as Trump is concerned, I mean, my simple general philosophy on that type of stuff is, if it's not something that you can control directly, you should waste about zero seconds worrying about it. Anytime you spend worrying about it, it's time wasted. So now for you, personally, what I would tell you is that build your profile, right? You have the time now, you have more time now than you will ever have in your entire life, whether or not you realize that. But you could use this time to build a strong profile to apply. And now once you go

for your visa interview, once you get that admit, tax when I would worry about whether you or not you get it, you didn't get it, whatever happens. And irrespective of what happens, it's still not in your hands, right? What is in your hand is to make that strong profile. Nobody Trump won't be able to do that or Trump won't be able to prevent you from doing that, right? You have to do that irrespective. And if that doesn't help you to end up in America, it will still help you in life. It's not like you're playing this random side quest game that has no effects whatsoever in your main quest, if that makes sense. So that's what I would say.

Don't worry about that stuff. Don't worry about what you can control. What you can control is building a strong profile. So I would put all of my eggs in that basket because you stand to gain from that basket and nobody else. That was definitely a very comprehensive understanding about, I would say, studying abroad. And I think most of my questions have been answered very neatly. There could be a few more questions that other people may have, may not have regarding how to prepare for GRE and stuff. But I think that is a pretty generic one which people can Google up and stuff. So I do not want to elongate this video with those questions, personally. We can tackle those later. And I think we have covered a lot of things, including how we need three LORs. I think you said three LORs from three different parts of life. A good SOP

but SOP is going to be pretty much similar to all the other ones. And then comes the work experience and products are not necessarily truths. Yeah, so I just want to push back on that. That's not necessarily true. I know for the fact my SOP had produced was unlike any other SOP that was submitted. And actually, I can confirm that because the program director told me so this is not conjecture on my end. This is what you do different than so yes, there are ways to do well for starters.

I did not do the equivalent of using chat GPT at the time to write it. So I would actually highly recommend against even taking a word from chat GPT to write your SOP. I know you said that earlier you were probably joking, but that is terrible advice. Please don't do that. If you actually want to take a word, you have to like every word. If you have such an amazing one controller in English, I'm taking yours. Yeah. And more so yeah, that's the other myth, right?

When it comes to this, this has nothing to do with your control over English. And it has everything to do with your storytelling. It's the story that you tell that makes or breaks your SOP and almost zero cable realizes. At least none of the people that I talked to when I was writing mine realizes you have to like, it's a one page document in which you have to write everything that you stand for where you come from, what it is that you want to gain, where you want to go.

Not just why you should be accepted, but what you bring for the university. It's very hard to and capture all of these things in one document, but it can be done using effective storytelling. That's what it boils down to. It's a taste that you leave in the admission committee's mouth. After they've read your essay, that determines whether or not they will accept you. So yeah, just some random thoughts on that. But I would have to let our rates to stand out. So you don't think that you're SOP? Yeah, I'm happy to share that. And it's funny I was looking at it the other day because somebody asked me and I just shared it with me because I don't care. But yeah, I would do it differently today. And I actually found a lot of criticisms in that as well. But hey,

we live and we learn that. Cool, cool. And anything specific around the work experience and projects that you mentioned that some projects that probably stand out from the other ones or ways to think about. Yeah, that's what I was going to get to. There are certain things that you can do, almost like a framework that you can follow. The biggest one would be projects that also in parallel demonstrate leadership are a huge, huge win always. So if you did a project as a owner or CEO versus just some worker that was there, you always want to be the former compared to the latter. In that case, it makes a huge difference because it shows that you can take ownership. Actually, just if you just Google entrepreneurial traits, whatever comes, if you can find is to leverage those things on your letter or on your LOR or on your whatever

documents that you're submitting. Like, because all of it matters, like it's the entire picture that you paint. It's not any of those documents in isolation. So all of those traits go a really long way. Leadership and impact are really big. And then also market relevance skills, I would say matter a lot. So one easy way to do this is by getting a certification. And I don't mean like a five minute video on LinkedIn. And I'm actually referring to a full blown certification course. Like if you did, maybe if you were applying for business analytics, if you did a Google, the Google has a really nice certification on business analytics. So I think it's just Google analytics. So if you did that, if you have that on your resume, it shows that you've put

whatever 40, 50 hours that it takes to work towards this thing. It's not just something that you're claiming that I want to do this was sure. But where's your agency? You have to A have agency and we communicate without a shadow of a doubt that you do have the agency to to excel at that college because from their perspective, they don't want a straggler. They don't want somebody that will slow down the entire class. In fact, they want to raise their ceiling. It's always about optimizing for the ceiling when it comes to university admissions. So yeah, I mean, I could, I could talk on and on, but it probably wouldn't be helpful. But yeah, those are two things to keep in mind, certifications, projects that demonstrate leadership that go a long way when it comes to

this stuff, aside from obviously stuff like your network that has a little bit more intangible in terms of how it helps you. And also just a completely separate topic altogether, which I don't really want to get into because it's just different. But yeah, you want to do all of those things like one framework to just think about this is if you really just upskill your life across all visible metrics, like, you know, we play these third person shooter games that has a skill tree, like, so imagine your skill tree and imagine you just using points to upgrade all of them, like in a line with the combustion. Even if you just did that, but even if you did that, that would still go a long way for your, like, admissions committee.

Because once you have that, then it just becomes a story of how do you want to convey this information, which is a much easier problem to solve compared to not having any information to convey, right? So I think I get my including remarks. Either way, yuck. That was fun. We should do that more often. And thanks for having me. Thanks for having me, have you on your show. Anyways, think I died again. On a side note, I just want you to ask me a few questions, which is tells me basically if you are in university, what do you seek in me? That brings us to the end of that episode, with a chance. Let me know if you want a part two. And if you want me to answer any specific questions that you have, please feel free to ping them in the comments. Also, thank you all for

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