Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (Online)
BS in Data Science and Applications - Foundation Level
January 2023 – September 2023
CGPA: 9.88 / 10

I spent my gap year after school completing the foundation level of IIT Madras's BS in Data Science and Applications. There were eight courses across two semesters, 32 credits in total, all formally assessed with in-person examinations. The programme built from the ground up: mathematical foundations through calculus and linear algebra, statistical reasoning from descriptive statistics through to probability, Bayesian estimation, hypothesis testing and regression, computational thinking that taught me how to decompose a problem and design an algorithm before touching code, and Python programming with the data science stack: pandas, NumPy, matplotlib, scipy.

What I came away with wasn't a collection of isolated technical skills. It was a way of approaching a problem: represent it formally, choose the right model or method, work through it quantitatively, implement it, and analyse the output. That pipeline has shaped how I think across everything I've done since.