Chapter 2

I am a big fan of Quentin Tarantino movies. Apart from worshiping every aspect of his film making, I find his narration absolutely compelling. He narrates the story (usually) in the form of  chapters and in non linear fashion. That is perhaps what I am also trying to do in this blog and I have absolutely no shame in copying his style. I believe copying and crediting the source is the purest form of admiration. So, the previous chapter ended with me deciding to study aerospace engineering early 2005. However, I ended up enrolling for a bachelor in mechanical engineering in 2008 in a local college in Hyderabad. In this chapter I am going to jump in time and focus from 2008 to 2012. I will come back to the proceedings between 2005 and 2008 in an other chapter. I am doing non linear narration for the sole purpose of paying homage to my favorite director and also trying to build some suspense! 

To say that I was disappointied with my college and study program was an understatement. Firstly, it was not aerospace engineering. Secondly, I never wanted to study in that college. In fact, I never wanted to study in India for that matter. More on this in an other chapter. The zeal I had to be an aerospace engineer never died with my dissapointment though. It only increased and I started reading/learning with a renewed vigor. I reached a peak in the middle of my first year of college. Then this slowly decayed within one year of my education. During this one year, I slowly started to make a lot friends and still stay in touch with most of them. Till today I am not sure if my zeal decreased with an increase in me spending time with my friends. I gave a lot of though on this many times but finally realized that I am too small within the fabric of this world to come to conclusion. Rather I realized that having those friends was one of the best thing that happened to me. 

This went on for a couple of years but deep down I was waiting for an opportunity to work on something substantial related to aerospace. Then,  a fateful thing happened in the summer of 2011, after my third year of engineering. I managed to find an internship in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) in NITTE Meenakshi Institute of Engineering in Bengaluru. More precisely, I had to work in computational aerodynamics. This was the right opportunity for me foray into the world of aerospace. This internship offer happened only due to my close friend Hitha Nanjappa (who is an avid blogger: https://thelostlander.com/). She suggested this internship program and I took that opportunity to learn something new in a field I was dearly waiting to work in. Even though the work was conducted only for 3 weeks, the prospect of combining simulation methods (CFD) and aerospace engineering was very novel for me at the time. I thought this could be a field I could try to do masters in. Within six months, I figured out where I wanted to study my masters and the only place I could think of was RWTH Aachen University in Germany. That place offered a masters program for simulation science which was a logical extension of my internship program in Bengaluru. The fact that education was free in Germany only helped me more. In fact, my application was dripping with passion for simulation and aerospace that I was the first student to be admitted in the program. Within 9 months of being admitted to the masters program, I found myself on a flight to Germany. Little did I know that I would end up where I am right now!