Okay so I cracked JEE and got into NIT Delhi, one of the most prestigious engineering institutes in India.

But within my first semester, I realized I really didn’t enjoy studying electrical circuits. To sum it up, I played basketball the entire time!

Then COVID hit in March 2020.

One random day, my sister told me to download this app called LinkedIn. I wasn’t really into it at first, but I gave in.

By coincidence, my feed at the time was full of designers posting stuff- 3D designs, apps, websites they’d built. And I clearly remember thinking: how do I create that? One Google search led to another, 60 hours of YouTube tutorials later, I was teaching myself Photoshop and experimenting with layouts late into the night.

By April 2020, I landed my first internship as a designer. That’s where everything changed!

I didn’t have a big plan at the time, just a curiosity to know how design works.

Along the way, I earned a scholarship from the Interaction Design Foundation and ranked in the top 300 out of 450,000+ students in the Upraised Design Program. That felt good, not because of the number, but because it reminded me I was moving in the right direction.

Soon after, I got to design products for some big brands

• Scaler Academy (tech learning, $710M)

• Milaap (India’s largest crowdfunding platform).

• EliteCircle (luxury concierge startup)

• Bditto (SaaS dashboard product)

• Beardo (mens grooming)

• Himalaya (wellness and personal care)

These experiences taught me very different lessons: how to design for scale and how to design with empathy.

Today, I’m at Tekion (automotive retail, $4B), where I started as an intern, grew into an Associate Product Designer, and now work as a Product Designer I.

I’ve built experiences and design systems for GM, Honda, and Acura. Shipped features that impacted how people experience the car-buying journey today.

Looking back, that one internship set off a journey that’s taken me from designing for startups and agencies to shaping experiences for big brands. More importantly, I am enjoying what I am doing this time, which is why I want to continue building it.

Though my parents are against me pursuing design & not engineering, I hope I will change their minds someday.

Lately, I’ve been pulled toward something deeper: the psychology behind design. Why people do what they do? How emotions quietly shape big decisions?

How human behavior is less rational than we think, we are emotional beings who decide based on feelings!

That’s what keeps me designing- figuring out how to make products feel a little more human.