Today I want to take you through my own journey of obstacles and how just beneath the surface were also my biggest opportunities about to change my life. The year was 2013, I was 20 and volunteering one evening with a few homeless children in Mumbai, I asked one of the kids what he wanted to be when he grew up and he said he wanted to be a pilot, for a homeless boy without any financial means to achieve his dreams is almost impossible where I come from.
And that was a huge turning point in my life, you see I was born and brought up in India where I saw a lot of poverty and kids who were forced to beg on the streets, this made me question my privileges a lot and I started wondering how I could make a difference in their lives, how can more children like him go to school where we don’t have free higher education. So 6 years ago I set out researching countries I could go to, to bring the best ways of helping students like him, and this quest brought me to the United Kingdom, specifically Glasgow where I was doing my masters degree, here I started learning more about the local community.
A few months after I finished my degree and with not much luck with the job or sponsorship visa, I was booking my flights to India, just as I was about to press book, an email popped up, it was a 10 minute web interview slot with a company in London to see if they could offer me an internship. I got the job! And due to hard work my four month internship turned into full time employment with a sponsored visa so I was able to stay in the UK.
Working at a technology company with no background in computer science, I was also the youngest- the next youngest was literally double my age and I was the only female, which is very common in the science, engineering and tech fields, I struggled to fit in, along the way I kept doing one thing I always found hope in- volunteering.
For example due to me being the only female at work, I decided to organize free public science lectures inviting women scientists to talk about their research, I started reaching out to scientists on twitter, as I was doing more research on this topic I discovered the support young people have in the UK to create their projects.
One such project was O2’s Think Big Programme aimed at 16-25 year old’s helping them with skills and finances, I was able to get some funding to organize my lectures, and along the way I was able to meet other young leaders the programme supported. I was really amazed by how these young people used the barriers they faced and turned them into successful projects I decided to create a documentary to show off these incredible young people!
One of the people I featured in my documentary was an 11 year old from South London, he was a self taught programmer who had been diagnosed with Tourette’s , he started organizing Autism and Tourette’s friendly coding classes for his local community.
From this documentary, and my other volunteering initiatives I also had the chance to meet Prince Harry in April 2018. All this due to the power of volunteering and using my obstacles as opportunities, which also led to me being featured on the Forbes Asia 30 under 30 list and Financial Times Top 100 ethnic minorities in tech in 2018 along with an invitation to speak at the European Commission, I now use these honours to continue working on projects that empower young people and bring them more opportunities.
Since I started undertaking my outreach projects I was offered a new job at an education technology company. However a year into my new role, things didn’t work out and I quit that job at the end of 2018, but now I had only 2 months left to find a new company that would sponsor my new work visa and if I didn’t, I had to go back home. I had no hope left until one day someone mentioned that there was a new visa introduced in 2015, it was called the Exceptional Talent visa for people in the digital field. So I spent the next month writing a personal statement of my work and what I wanted to do in the UK.
And so the days went by, it was now 2019 and just a few days later I get an email from the Home Office, they had attached the results of my submission and my heart was sinking, as I opened it, it said, ‘you have been endorsed in the exceptional talent category’. I burst out with joy and started my visa process, 3 weeks later I was back in the UK and the biggest gift when I came back was when I finally found an organization that gives scholarships to students in India who come from poor backgrounds to go to university, I am joining hands to help more students in India. After 6 years of hard work and an emotional journey, I was able to do what I set out to do.