Starting out without a roadmap
I started my B.Sc. in Information Technology at Patkar-Varde College, Mumbai University, in June 2024, and I'll be honest — I didn't have a five-year plan. I knew I liked the idea of building things with code, and I knew the degree would give me structure, but the actual path from "I like computers" to "I co-founded a deployed marketplace app" wasn't something I mapped out in advance. It happened one project at a time.
First year: GPA, HTML, and a lot of confusion
My first year GPA came out to 8.73, which I'm genuinely proud of, but the honest version of that story includes a lot of late nights figuring out concepts that seemed obvious in hindsight and completely opaque the first time around. Outside of coursework, I started with the basics — HTML, then CSS, then JavaScript — the same sequence most self-taught developers follow, except I was doing it alongside a full academic course load rather than as a dedicated bootcamp.
I picked up an HTML certification through IIT Bombay's Spoken Tutorial programme fairly early on, and looking back, my score on that one (65%) is a pretty accurate reflection of where I actually was at the time — competent, not yet confident. That's an important distinction I had to get comfortable with: certifications are checkpoints, not finish lines.
There's also a practical side to first year that doesn't show up on a transcript: figuring out how to actually study IT subjects, which are a strange mix of theory-heavy and hands-on. Some courses wanted memorised definitions, others wanted me to write and debug code under exam conditions, and I had to learn fairly quickly which study habits worked for which kind of subject. I commute into Mumbai from Virar for college, which on a bad day eats a couple of hours each way — so a fair amount of my early HTML and CSS practice genuinely happened on my phone during that commute, which is a less glamorous origin story than most "how I started coding" posts, but it's the honest one.
Finding PHP and building something real
The turning point was deciding to actually build something instead of just completing more tutorials. That something became KisanX — a project I co-founded to tackle a real problem in Indian agriculture, where farmers lose income to middlemen and have little direct access to customers. I built the first version in PHP and MySQL, which meant learning server-side scripting, session handling, and relational database design well enough to ship a working e-commerce flow: listings, cart, wishlist, checkout, order tracking, all of it.
That project taught me more in a few months than any single semester had. There's a specific kind of learning that only happens when something you built is actually being used and something breaks — you can't look up the exact fix in a textbook, you have to actually understand what's happening underneath. I've written more about how that PHP prototype eventually became a full MERN-stack and React Native app in a separate article, if you want the technical detail.
Stacking certifications without losing focus
Alongside KisanX, I kept adding certifications — Advanced C++ Training (100%) and R Programming (92.5%) through IIT Bombay, PHP & MySQL Training (72%) also through EduPyramids, and a Python for Cyber Security course co-funded under the Erasmus+ programme. I also completed two Deloitte job simulations via Forage, one in technology and one in cybersecurity.
I'll admit the temptation with certifications is to collect them for the sake of collecting them. What kept that in check for me was making sure each one connected to something I was actually building. The PHP & MySQL training reinforced exactly what I needed for KisanX's first phase. The Python for Cyber Security course directly shaped how I approached authentication and input validation when I rebuilt KisanX's backend in Node.js. None of it was certification for a resume line item — it was certification that fed back into the actual work.
Presenting at Avishkar
One of the proudest moments of my degree so far was presenting KisanX at the Avishkar Inter-Collegiate Research Convention, organised by the University of Mumbai. We were selected in the Agriculture & Animal Husbandry category at the undergraduate level, out of multiple institutional entries, and got to demonstrate a working prototype — covering both the PHP web app and the MERN/React Native mobile rebuild — directly to academic evaluators.
Standing in front of people who were going to ask hard, specific questions about architecture decisions forced me to actually understand why I'd made each choice, not just that the choice worked. That kind of pressure is different from a viva or a coding test, and it sharpened how I talk about technical work in general — a skill I didn't expect a research convention to teach me, but it did.
What balancing both actually looks like
People sometimes ask how I "balance" academics and building real projects, as if there's a clean formula. There isn't, really. Some weeks, coursework takes priority and KisanX sits untouched. Other weeks, I'm deep in a bug at 11pm and barely glance at lecture notes. What's worked for me is treating both as long-term investments rather than competing priorities — my GPA matters, but so does having something to show beyond a transcript, and I've tried not to sacrifice one entirely for the other.
It also helps that I joined the Tech Titans Club at Patkar-Varde College, which gave me a community of people doing similar things — hackathons, seminars, occasional chaos — rather than treating coding as something separate from college life. Having people around who understood why I'd disappear into a debugging session instead of socialising made the whole thing feel less isolating, and a lot less like I was choosing projects over a social life.
I also speak English, Hindi, and Marathi, and switching between them — explaining a technical concept to a professor in one register and to a relative in another — turned out to be unexpectedly good practice for communication in general. Being recognised with a Best Personality award in 12th grade probably had more to do with that than with anything technical, but I think it fed into the same skill set I now use when presenting KisanX to people who aren't developers.
What I'd tell a first-year IT student
If you're early in a B.Sc. IT degree and feeling like there's a "correct" order to learn things in, I'd say: there isn't, but there is a useful one. Get comfortable with the fundamentals, then pick a real problem — not a tutorial clone — and build toward it. Let your certifications follow your project, not the other way around. And take the opportunities your college offers, like research conventions or technical clubs, seriously even when they feel like extra work on top of an already full course load. They end up being the moments that actually shape how you think about your own skills.
If you want to see where all of this landed, the Projects page has the full portfolio, and my resume lays out the timeline in full.