Kriti Kapoor graduated in 2009 and came to the US to pursue higher studies. After working in the process control domain in the semiconductor industry for more than 5 years, she moved to Amazon as a software engineer. Presently she lives in Austin, TX with her family and is enjoying hobbies like travelling, hiking and gardening. If I have to summarize what I learnt in the last 10 years, it would be that you really can't predict the future. Time does have a lot of potential in changing the world around you. Most of us had roughly laid out career paths in our minds as we prepared to graduate from IITB back in 2009, but very few ended up following them through. It all became about evolving opportunities, evolving markets, evolving passions and sometimes even about discovering hidden interests. If someone told me - the nerd who fought tooth and nail to get into a good PhD program while dreaming of a shiny career in the loaded oil & gas industry - that I'll be a code monkey in a big software company, I'd have been confused to say the least. That just didn't fit the plan I had. Also, isn’t coding a CS thing? I mean, I had barely managed to get through one semester of CS101, all the while cursing that cold yet comfortable LT for putting me to sleep through lectures. Not to mention the constant questioning for the need to put a ChE student through the rigors of programming. But here I am – a ChE PhD excited to be solving real world software challenges.
I'm sure this derailing from the original career path happened to many of us. When we entered our final year at IITB, bank and consulting jobs seemed the most glamorous ones in non-core. For ChEs, FMCG and O&G industry gave a good balance of career growth and staying connected to your engineering major. Some of our seniors had started paving the entrepreneurship path but it hadn't picked up the pace by then. Then a few months before placements, we heard about the news of Lehman Brothers going bankrupt – a consistent Day 1 company up until that point. Many of us were just learning about this new addition to our vocabulary - "recession", especially the unaware non-readers like me. Then we realized that it wasn't just banks. A prestigious O&G firm that would typically hire dozens from IITB every year with arguably the best salaries, gave just one token offer that year. Recession wasn’t the only hurdle for IIT Bombay. Less than a week before placements, the infamous 26/11 Mumbai attacks had happened stopping quite a few potential employers from traveling to Mumbai for interviews. Day 1 placement numbers went from 100 in 2007 to 30 in 2008. Some batchmates planning to go for higher studies didn’t sit for placements to give others the chance to fight for those few valuable jobs. Weeks went by and some of our batchmates with killer resumes were still not placed. Some of us already had plans to study further and some decided to do that hoping to come back to a better job market in a few years.
I came to UT Austin for my PhD in the "Process Control & Optimization" group. We worked on algorithms to solve the problems faced by the semiconductor and O&G industries and drive them to a more efficient and precise future. UT Austin had the best Petroleum Engineering program in the country. Proximity to the O&G hub – Houston – made sure our seniors and batchmates here got the best opportunities in that lucrative job market. Clearly, the career path I always imagined was well illuminated now. Four years of PhD along with a summer internship gave me the opportunity to wet my feet in the world of coding and algorithms and get hands on with optimization problems in industrial setting. In hindsight, the main takeaway for me was learning to deal with ambiguity and gaining a sense of ownership which later greatly helped me throughout my professional career.
Fast forward to 2013, yet another placement season. After going through a series of interviews, rejections, and missed opportunities, I landed my first job in Freescale Semiconductors as an APC (Advanced Process Control) Engineer. This wasn't according to my plan and definitely wasn't my first choice. I did appreciate, more so in hindsight, the unique opportunity to build process control software for large manufacturing sites. Meanwhile, oil prices crashed and there were massive layoffs in parts of the O&G sector. Some of our friends in Houston lost their jobs and some lived in the constant fear of losing their jobs. It gets especially stressful when you are in a foreign country where your immigration status depends on your ability to keep that job. We even heard about folks having to move out of the US with their families as they got laid off. The semiconductor industry wasn’t as affected and I did get to grow in my role to a larger scope of ownership. But over time I realized that there was little room for innovation in that field and that got reflected in the lack of growth opportunities beyond that point. The high frequency of layoffs was not a good sign either. Within a year of me browsing external opportunities, the decision was made for me and my "position was terminated as part of cost cutting measures".
Layoffs can be bittersweet blessings in disguise and for me it definitely was the case. I got fully paid 3 months to focus solely on finding a job. Initial market survey made me aware of how much the tech industry had boomed over the past decade or so. I faced the hard choice of either sticking to my niche area of expertise or to grow out of it. I chose the latter, but the main challenge I faced was that my industry experience and educational background hadn't equipped me for the rigorous software interview process - the one CS101 course that I took 14 years ago wasn't going to be enough. So I dove deep into my self-taught crash course on data structures and algorithms with one eye on the strict timeline constraint imposed by the US immigration. Couple of months of job hunt and few more months of visa struggles later, I finally joined Amazon as a Software Engineer late last year. None of this was planned but these past 10 months have given me the most rewarding experience of my professional career so far.
This was just my journey - 1 out of over 500 smart IITBians that graduated following the financial crisis of 2008. I'm pretty sure everyone else has paved their own unique career path and have continued to excel in that - be it entrepreneurship, research, teaching, engineering, finance or anything else. Most of the career options we had back in 2008 are still very much there along with some new growth areas. I'm no economics expert but life experience tells me that when markets go through drastic shifts like the 2008 recession, or the oil market crash that followed later, usually more room is made for new industries to flourish. At least that seems like a sensible perspective to anchor our hopes on while we navigate these temporary rough waters of COVID-19.
As students, we – probably like most of you now – gave a lot of importance to campus placements and anticipated our entire career to depend on that first job, which caused us a lot of anxiety and stress given the 2008 financial climate. I have now learnt that navigating a career is a long journey with its ups and downs. My advice to all those just starting out in these uncertain times would be to plan if you must, but stay open to and aware of the changing possibilities around you. If something greatly interests you, never be afraid to focus and pursue that. If there is a dip in terms of opportunities, it's temporary. As the timeless cliché goes, "Change is the only constant". Embrace it and strive to keep learning always, growing and evolving with the world around you.