Outside of classes and work, IIT Hyderabad kept me busy in ways that had little to do with either.

I helped run Vibes, the college music club, for a couple of years, mostly organizing gigs and trying to keep the instruments from falling apart. Around the same time I ended up Core at Lambda (the web and app dev club) and Kludge (the infosec club), teaching first-years Bash and Linux, building the backend for Halloc (a hostel allocation system), and writing CTF challenges. I also ran a few ML sessions for the Google Developers Student Club, which mostly meant explaining gradient descent to people who asked better questions than I could answer.

I helped with sponsorships for TEDxIITHyderabad and ran events, including the Model UN, for Zozimus, the college’s literary fest, largely by emailing a lot of companies and hoping some said yes. Between 2022 and 2024 I was also a teaching assistant for probability, programming, and math foundations, which taught me more about explaining things clearly than the actual coursework did. This has been one of my greatest learning points: teaching is the best way to learn something.

More recently, I trained as a UG Buddy for Sunshine, the mental health and counselling cell, and helped run their Happiness Carnival.

I played guitar in Blackpigs, the college band, and got roped into a few Inter IIT meets: sports, tech (twice), cultural (twice), and a stint on the college football team. I’ve been quizzing and debating since high school, more out of habit than any particular skill, and somewhere along the way picked up a black belt in Karate and finished every level of UCMAS’s abacus program.

See Achievements for the academic side of things.