I am Mrinal and currently based in Bangalore (a Bangalorean). I hail from a small semi-city named Ranchi in Jharkhand where I grew up and pursued all my education till engineering. I am married and stay in Bangalore with my wife & son (currently 13 years). I did my B.Tech. in Manufacturing Engineering from NIFFT (Ranchi University) in the year 1998 and since then had been working in central government (Indian Railways), public sector (BHEL) and MNC’s (Alstom, GE Oil & Gas) in mechanical engineering domain – in the field of power plant engineering. My area was the engineering of various power plant systems and designing of sub-systems.
After 17 years of my job life, I thought that it was time to take up entrepreneurship and so started in my own business of engineering solutions for renewable energy power projects. Though I started on my own but due to the nature of the engineering industry, I realized my bottleneck of low capital & low risk taking capacity.
At that point , one day while I was teaching my son Python programming after learning myself from YouTube, it occurred to me that I was loving this subject since my college and also veered to coding during my job on & off – for example, tried to make some small design calculation tool in my job in VB, etc. And then it was a field where one’s knowledge & skill & a laptop were sufficient resources to scale heights & success. I recollected that I cleared IIT JEE in 1995 and that I was enough intelligent to pursue this. And finally, the biggest satisfaction that you get is – you think it, you do it. That’s it. I wanted to be a software developer.
How did you hear about AttainU? Describe your first reaction about AttainU program and thoughts about joining it.
I started with various online resources over Youtube, freecodecamp, Udemy….and it occurred to me that though everything was online but a mentor-ship is required for one to get guidance in learning, approaching & practising the application of the concepts. I approached many places but some places it was high fees barrier while some it was they never responded. And then I met AttainU in one of the Facebook startup community. And then I applied to it. I learnt that it does not charge upfront and that was a big blessing as I had hardly any money to invest in any education at that point in time. So the selection round began and I answered all the questions and then I was all set to join. So finally in April-2019, I joined the AttainU course.
Describe your course journey? Tell us about your instructors, AMA sessions, Mentors, AttainU Team, batchmates, course schedule, difficulties during course, support, emotional connection with your instructors etc
Our batch was named Falcon and our instructor was Arkesh. A very very patient teacher with a great listening skill who would very patiently listen to all diverse questions emanating from participants as diverse as my background and as those who were Computer Science graduates.
He is an excellent coder and live coding is not only a cakewalk for him, but he takes the whole class with him explaining each and every logic – every twist, turns, techniques & tricks. There were coding challenges every morning and then lectures and followed by assignments. This super packed dosage gave the full nourishment to a budding developer coupled with the guidance & mentorship from Arkesh.
There were steep learning curves during the course – particularly React phase. But after applying the concepts taught, we were slowly becoming confident in our skills and approach. When we successfully did full-stack projects and deployed live webapps … and that too twice in our course, we were confident that we can do the same in our profession the same thing.
Tell us about your placement experience. How were you feeling in the beginning? your first interview experience, your dull moments, the support you received to cracking the interviews.
We were having a detailed session on Interview preparation and AMA’s for interview with AttainU mentors & teachers. Initially, it was like mostly theoretical and then when one faces it, definitely one is designed to get awed by the sheer thought that the questions could be from anywhere and then there are behavioural aspects too. So I began revising the concepts going back to the lecture sessions where I had few long left out practices. And then there was all the time the fear that what if I am told that I was too old & that I did not have relevant job experience. There were mock interviews and tests. I asked Arkesh which all areas to focus on for which he said that focus on your strengths. That was spot on.
How are you feeling after getting this job? About your excitement and dream.
After getting my job the biggest feeling in me I have is that “Yes, it is doable when you have right mentorship“ and AttainU had been exactly the answer to this. It was a dream for me to be trained and professionally tuned to be a software developer and AttainU just did that. I am super excited to start my journey into this field where every moment is impregnated with imagination, innovation and creativity. I can spell it in JS language like this (Aspiration, Effort, Mentorship) => (Success)