Alumni Boudhayan and his take on CSE as a field and his tryst with NIIT University

I am Boudhayan Gupta from NIIT University’s (NU) Class of 2017, BTech CSE (Computer Science and Engineering). Sharing my experiences at NU with all of you is a chance for me to relive all my pleasant campus memories.

At first, when I arrived at the campus, I felt somewhat isolated in a place like Neemrana, far away from anywhere, in a tiny town, not knowing anyone else. With time, I made friends, spent more time with faculty, and began enjoying the absolutely stunning campus.

Unfortunately, my on-campus experience was a bit shorter than the rest of the students, because during my last on-campus semester I was on campus for barely a month, travelling to multiple international conferences and preparing for my upcoming immigration to Germany. I did my Industry Practice semester in Germany, and I have been there ever since.

My first full-time role was as a software engineer for a financial services company called PPRO Financial Ltd, based in Munich, Germany. PPRO is a payment processing company, and my job was to write integrations with alternative payment methods. I currently work at SAP SE, at their global headquarters in Walldorf, Germany. I am a software developer, working on one of the core compute engines for SAP HANA, our flagship in-memory database platform. My job involves an extreme focus on reliability and speed at the same time, which makes this particular development role very challenging and interesting.

My career success so far has been driven by the many technical and non-technical skills I picked up at NU. While technical skills are a function of the curriculum and how hard we work, the non-technical skills need more involvement from the student. The ones I found most relevant are:

• Mental health awareness: Self-care, maintaining a proper work-life balance, and listening to your brain and taking a break or a vacation when you need it is important.
• Emotional intelligence: Reading people’s emotions, and even recognising your own emotions is important for success.
• Presentation skills: Collaboration is important and communication and presentations skills are critical for achieving effective collaboration, especially in my field.

I’d hope that students at NU focus on social sciences courses even if they are in engineering. They should focus on learning the subject inside-out rather than focus on grades, and they should learn to take calculated risks that take their career ahead.