Achieving Success in Tech Industry: Sneha's Inspiring Career Transformation
Sneha Ishwar Naik is a B.Sc graduate, hailing from the coastal region of Karnataka. Always one whose name you could find on the topper lists of her college, preparing for competitive exams felt like the natural next step. However, life had something else in store for her.
After making the scary choice to completely transition her career path, she joined Masai to find her place in the evolving tech world. 37 weeks later, she is a skilled software developer working for CloudThat. She makes time from her busy day to talk about her experience in Masai and advice to future students.
How did you find out about Masai?
After finishing my graduation, the next step for me was to prepare for competitive exams, given my academic background, leaning into it felt natural. After spending almost a year preparing for the same, I got to hear about Masai from a friend. Her cousin had joined Masai earlier and got placed in a fantastic company.
After hearing about his journey and offer, I started thinking about Masai. My brother, who’s a software developer himself, also helped me a lot with making up my mind about joining and that I could do it.
How did your parents react?
They were very supportive, actually. They were always ready to motivate me and make me feel like I could make the transition. Whenever I wanted to slack off even a little, they were there to remind me to push myself a bit further. Even my brother was a source of inspiration and help whenever I needed it.
What was your favorite thing about Masai?
Masai emphasizes practice-based learning, which I believe is the best way to teach anything. The assignments we had to complete always made us put our learnings into practice. Not only was it helpful, as we weren’t just learning theory, but it also allowed us to gauge our level of performance very well.
How was your construct week experience?
The construct week project is extremely helpful! It’s not like it was just a one-week thing, even after that whenever we got any free time we went back to the project, refining it, improving it even just a little. Along with learning accountability, I got to connect with other people and learned from their methods and thought processes.
It was a good experience in also learning how to manage work in a group of people who are different from each other in their working process. Maintaining communication, assigning work, and pushing each other to meet deadlines. Mirroring how we would work in an actual professional environment.
Even now when I’m working, if I get stuck somewhere I come back to refer to the construct week projects, they are just that helpful.
Tell us about your placement experience
I had quite a novel placement experience, as I didn’t interview for a single company. After finishing my last unit, which was the revision unit, I had planned on sitting for some interviews outside the placement process first, just to get some experience.
I had hoped that armed with that outside experience, I’d be able to do even better in the Masai placement process. With that in mind, I gave the interview for CloudThat, but to my surprise, I cleared it in the first go and directly joined. So it was different but satisfying and equipped with the relevant skills and knowledge from Masai. It was a very smooth experience.
Advice to future students
I’ll just share what I told to some of my friends who were confused. You should join Masai, even if you feel you are lost right now, you can join Masai. Call it a solution or a direction, but once you join, you won’t have time to be lazy. You have to be attentive and proactive to make the most of it.