I can still remember the moment. A quiet afternoon in my first year of college, walking past a poster stuck slightly askew on the department wall: “Seeking students for an IoT project.”

It just caught my eye. I had no background in hardware, and, truthfully, I didn’t even know what “embedded systems” really meant. But something—a quiet spark of curiosity, perhaps—made me pause, take a photo of the poster, and later that night, send a hesitant email. That moment, which seemed so inconsequential at the time, became the flap of a butterfly’s wing.

What followed was a crash course in self-teaching, late-night debugging, and learning to build with both my hands and mind. By the end of the year, I had co-developed two working prototypes: a smart medicine dispenser and a stove timer control system. Both were later published as patents. That led to the Budding Engineer Award—an honor given annually to just two second-year students.

My achievements checked every box of conventional success. But I still felt disconnected, lacking that quiet sense of alignment that tells you you're building something that truly fits. I was proud, yes, but still searching.

The next domino fell during my internship at the National Informatics Centre. I was expecting a standard backend assignment. I hadn’t expected to be placed on the AI & Data Science team, and at the time, the field felt abstract and a bit intimidating.

But as I began building a file-based question-answering system using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and LLaMA 3, something clicked. That sense of alignment I had been missing? I felt it then. I found myself staying up late, not out of pressure, but out of genuine curiosity. That internship did more than just expand my technical toolkit; it gave me direction. It turned curiosity into conviction.

The next ripple came during my six-month internship at Hyundai Motor India, where I joined the Internal Audit Division. It was unfamiliar territory, a room full of Chartered Accountants, with me as the lone data analyst. But that difference became my value. I worked through vast financial records, detected anomalies, and provided insights that directly supported audit processes and internal reviews.

What struck me was this: even in a traditional, compliance-focused environment, data had the power to challenge assumptions, improve systems, and guide meaningful decisions. It was more than just code or numbers; it was clarity, context, and consequence. This insight stayed with me and resurfaced when a friend shared their frustration with long, manual site assessments.

That conversation led to ArchiScout, a chatbot that automates site analysis for architectural planning. What began as a side project to help a friend soon evolved into something far more meaningful. A process that typically took weeks could now be done in minutes. Today, architecture students in my circle use it informally to fast-track their assignments. I now see ArchiScout as a blueprint for the kind of systems I want to build: tools that think with you, not just for you.

Knowing that my work was not just technically sound but genuinely useful was deeply fulfilling. I'm now working on publishing the project in hopes of making it accessible on a larger scale. But I know its true potential is still untapped. I want to refine it, scale it, and integrate more advanced models—steps I cannot take without a stronger academic foundation. That’s why I’m applying for a Master’s in Data Science.

[University-specific paragraph]

This Master’s program isn’t the destination—it’s the next ripple in a journey that began with a quiet choice I barely understood at the time. I want to take ArchiScout further and transform it into a robust, adaptable tool that genuinely supports architectural workflows. Over time, I hope to immerse myself in research that doesn’t just demonstrate technical capability but addresses problems that actually matter.

I entered college with questions, not a map. I followed sparks: a poster on a wall, an unexpected internship placement, and a conversation with a friend. And slowly, those sparks began to form a pattern. With every late-night debug session, every misstep turned into insight, and every unlikely opportunity followed by purpose, I found direction.

That accidental placement on the AI & Data Science team at NIC wasn’t just a lucky mismatch; it was the flap of a butterfly’s wing. What felt like a detour became a defining moment. It turned uncertainty into curiosity, and curiosity into conviction.

Now, I seek to deepen that conviction in an environment that challenges me intellectually, supports my growth, and equips me to design systems that think with you, not just for you, because I believe your program is where that impact can truly begin to scale