Landing a job with a handsome pay through campus placements in premier engineering colleges across India is quite the norm, and if the offer is from one of the world’s biggest companies, then there is definitely reason to rejoice.
But 22-year-old coder Aditya Paliwal from Mumbai has set the bar high after he got an offer from Google — to work for their Artificial Intelligence (AI) research wing in New York at a mind-boggling pay of Rs 1.2 crore per annum.
Aditya finished his integrated M.Tech course in Computer Science at the International Institute of Information Technology-Bangalore (IIIT-B) recently. He was introduced to coding in Class 8, but he said that at that time it was a passive interest. It remained so till the time he cleared his IIT-JEE, and secured a seat in IIIT-B.
“So after coming into the college, the curriculum and the environment made the passive interest grow into an active interest,” he said.
The Google offer did not come easy. He was one of the 50 finalists at the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest after he beat 6,000 from students across the globe who cleared the preliminary round of the selection process.
Out of those 50 who landed a job at Google’s prestigious AI Research wing, five are from India, including Aditya. The competition saw close to 50,000 participants from a total of 111 counties and 3,098 universities.
Explaining the process, Aditya told TNM: “It’s open to all students across the world and you apply with your resume along with a Statement of Purpose and a recommendation letter. Based on this they shortlist you, and there are subsequent rounds of interviews and at the end of it, you get the job.”
“Usually, after a CS degree, people get a proper engineering job but this is a job in the research domain. So more than common problems, it is more about trying to solve open problems and shortlisting potential future problems and finding answers to them,” he said.
AI is also Aditya’s subject of choice. “I had a couple of papers and after AI came, I felt like that the field is progressing rapidly and I got the confidence that with a little bit of effort in research we can do a lot more in the future,” he said.
But according to him, his focus was never on the job he would get at the end of five years, but on learning.
“I never worried about it (getting a job) too much. I knew I would always have one year at the end of the course to prepare to refocus on employment tests. So the focus was mostly on learning as many things as possible and meeting interesting people and ideas. The goal was to develop new interests and master a few,” Aditya said.
But even he admits it was kind of a “big deal” when this job was in the realm of possibilities.
When asked about his current professional goals. Aditya remains consistent on the learning part.
“At this moment, I can't really tell. There are vague ideas here and there but nothing concrete. All I want to do is learn the maximum as I can and meet as many interesting people as I can,” he said.
While his parents work in their family business, his younger brother is studying Commerce. Aditya is set to start his career at Google on July 18.