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Akshat Kaul

I had gone to the AI and Robotics Lab in Milan for my summer internship and had come back on Aug 2. By this time placements had already started. I wasn’t seriously interested in placements as I had been planning to go for an MS in CS. Univ decisions come in around May, so I decided to take part in the placement process to have something in hand.

By December, I had 3 offers: Accenture (Cat C), Maruti (Cat B) and EValueserve (Cat B). In December, I heard that a Cat-A financial services company “RANet” was coming on campus. As finance was a field I was interested in, I checked out the details and it turned out the RANet was the Indian subsidiary of an NY based hedge fund. This made it an interesting option to pursue. After they had short listed my resume, they invited me to the interview which went quite well. I was impressed with the kind of work they were doing here and fortunately, they were impressed with the work I had done previously (a number of my projects were Machine Learning based and this meant working with large datasets). Finally, they selected me and Pratibha (from IT). It was a very small company.. just 4 people in Delhi, around 10 in Bombay and 10 in NY, but it still sounded quite promising and the money was good.

Later, in May, I got my MS in CS admits from University of Michigan, Columbia and a few other places. This put me in a bit of a quandary, as the opportunity to work for a hedge fund was one I didn’t want to pass up. So I got my Michigan admit deferred for one year to get some work-ex at RANet. This turned out to be a good decision as the economy crashed soon after and being in the graduating class of 2010 from UMich might have put me in a tough spot with the jobs getting scarce.

Now, at the end of one year of working at RANet, I can say that it has been an excellent experience. The work has been enjoyable and my colleagues are really nice people. I’m quite glad to have gotten this opportunity."