I am 27 years old and I am starting a second bachelor's degree in Electronics Engineering in September 2025. This post is an attempt to explain how I got here, why it took me this long, and why I kept myself away from this path even when the interest was there.
I joined IIT Roorkee in 2017 to study Architecture. I chose it because I wanted a creative career, but it became clear fairly quickly that I wasn't particularly curious about architecture as a field. I didn't find myself wanting to go deeper into it. What I did find interesting was programming and especially a research project I took up in my second year, where I built a hardware prototype to dynamically control an air conditioner's temperature based on indoor and outdoor differentials. It was my first time building technology for actual human use, and I found it genuinely exciting. That project introduced me to HCI, and from there my focus shifted toward software and interface design.
I spent the rest of my undergrad building in that direction independently, since there were no HCI researchers at my college. I published work at CHI Play 2020, worked as a research assistant in a Research Lab, and eventually joined Chronicle straight out of college as an early engineer in 2022. At Chronicle, we were building presentation software and I got to work on some interesting GUI problems. A year later in 2023, I left the job and seriously started thinking about graduate school in HCI as next step in my career.
To prepare my profile, I started working with Prof. Zhu-tian Chen informally in August 2024, alongside my day job (at yet another startup) helping with his startup and a research project on using AI agents for data science workflows. I received a PhD offer to work with him in the Computer Science Department at the University of Minnesota. I spent months thinking about whether to accept it.
I ultimately declined. Part of the reason was personal. I had recently met someone I am very happy with, and wasn't willing to do five years of long distance. But there was another reason that I only became clear about after the fact. I continued the internship with Prof. Chen after declining the offer, and somewhere during that time I realised that I would probably have dropped out of the PhD if I had gone. I enjoyed building technical systems. But I did not feel genuinely curious about HCI research questions. I wasn't motivated to read the literature or think deeply about novel interactions for their own sake. The desire to pursue a PhD in HCI was driven more by extrinsic motivation (prestige of being a PhD and a life in the US) than real interest.
The honest answer is that I was afraid it wasn't practical. Electronics as a career, especially in India, felt like a harder path than software. The salaries are lower, the job market is smaller, and it takes longer to build expertise. Software was the easier and more obvious choice, and I had enough genuine interest in building things that I could convince myself it was the right fit.
But the interest in electronics and physics never really went away. I have always been more excited about understanding how things work at a fundamental level than about building another SaaS product. I find the problems in embedded systems and hardware more interesting than frontend or backend web work. The constraint of working with real physical systems, where you have to actually understand what is happening rather than just finding a workaround, appeals to me.
Although the HCI path felt like it had more prestige and clearer external validation attached to it. Electronics felt more uncertain.
After declining the PhD and ending the internship with Prof. Chen, I had to figure out what I actually wanted to do. I noted my geniune curiosity which regularly brought me back to the same things — embedded systems, low-level programming, the kind of work that requires understanding engineering at a level that most software people don't bother with.
I have also been reading about where India is heading as a country in terms of manufacturing and deep tech. The space sector here is growing. Companies like Pixxel and Skyroot are doing real work. There is a genuine need for engineers who can build hardware, and there are very few people with that combination of skills. That felt like a more meaningful place to contribute than yet another web product.
So I enrolled in a second bachelor's in Electronic Systems, starting September 2025. My goal for the near term is to build a strong enough foundation in electronics and embedded systems to join a space-tech startup in India as an embedded software engineer.
I have given myself five years for this transition. I am aware that I have changed directions before, and I want to be honest with myself about that. So I have set a personal rule: if I abandon this path prematurely, I will accept that my ambitions exceed my willingness to do the work, and I will settle into a stable job and build a good life around that. That is not a failure, but it is my personal worst case, and I am motivated to avoid it.
I am not going into this blind. I know it will take longer than software did. I know the initial years will involve learning things I find difficult. But the interest is genuine this time, and I think that matters more than anything else.