Having to drive an Uber cab to becoming an Engineer

“Passion and curiosity are something one should have while going through a routine as rigorous as the 9-9-6 system at Masai. The right guidance is something that is equally necessary as you progress along, which is the best part about the staff at Masai School.”

Ashish Raj’s father is a farmer who hails from Munger in Bihar, and his mother is a homemaker. His uncle happened to have owned a cybercafe in the town, where Ashish spent a large part of his childhood. A natural inclination towards computers happened at this time, and he wanted to come back and learn the fundamentals of programming at a later point. 

Having grown up and studied in Munger most of his life, Ashish moved to Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, for further education. Upon advice from friends and family that he would land a job in the government sector, he took up a Diploma in Electrical Engineering. 

To pursue his Diploma in Electrical Engineering, Ashish had to move to Bhopal, where his local guardian was an elder cousin who happened to be running a small travel agency in the town. Ashish has three elder siblings. The older brother helps his father on the farm, the second brother works with Amazon as a delivery executive, and his sister just graduated with a B.Com.

Back in Bhopal, Ashish was struggling to make ends meet during his Diploma. He took his cousin’s help to learn to drive a four-wheeled vehicle and obtained a driver’s license for the same. Initially, he was working with a BPO for 6 months for which he had to walk more than 12 kilometers every day for work. Upon a contract that he would make somewhere between Rs 4000 to 5000 per month, Ashish worked as a cab driver in Bhopal with the cab aggregator Uber. 

He also spent 5 years of his early childhood at the Bihar School of Yoga in Munger. Thanks to this, he says a disciplined routine has become a core part of his lifestyle. As it reflected later, Ashish was in college from 9AM to 6PM, and would later get behind the wheels to drive the Uber cab from 9PM to 4AM.

He would again get ready for college and head to the class by 9AM sharp. This continued for 2 years and 6 months and upon the completion of his diploma, he came across Masai School.

A story on Google introduced him to Masai, which he considered a golden opportunity and got in touch with. Upon cracking the entrance, Ashish started his Full Stack Web Development course in April 2020.

HTML, CSS, Javascript along with the MERN stack are the languages and tools Ashish learned at Masai. He opines that he had never expected the kind of mentorship he had received from Masai School. Ashish built a clone of the professional networking website LinkedIn as part of his project work.

Watch Ashish narrate his journey in this video-

“Every programmer should be passionate enough about coding. If a single dot goes missing in your code, you might have to spend 3 days fixing it. It’s like learning to ride a bike. Whenever you fall, you get back upon it and move on upon learning it again. The same goes with software programming, for which any aspiring developer needs a lot of ‘never give up attitude.”