The difficulty level

“My academic journey has been quite organic. Ever since as a child, I loved Science. In school, Mathematics interested me the most. My mother was a Maths teacher and perhaps the inclination towards the subject came partly from there. I thought of going for a Bachelor’s in the same, but my mother told me that the Maths we study after school is very different and both my parents were of the opinion that I could do better.

They put me in an IIT coaching centre although I was hardly interested in pursuing engineering. I had studied in a local school with a local state curriculum and didn’t have the kind of academic exposure that students from CBSE or ICSE boards might get in general. So one of the positive sides of joining the IIT coaching centre was that I got to know about the KVPY scholarship examination. I appeared for it and qualified. It was around the same time when IISERs had just started coming up and naturally I didn’t then have an idea what an IISER was. However, owing to being a KVPY scholar, I got a call from IISER for pursuing their integrated BS-MS course. My parents were happy thinking that IISER might just be similar to IITs and that a job was guaranteed at the end of the degree. Of course, that wasn’t true but since they were happy and I was getting an opportunity to do Science, something that I was really interested in, I decided to take it up.