The Leap of Faith (Summer 2021)
Picture a campus where the painters still share the corridor with professors. That was Plaksha when I first visited: two usable floors in the Bharti Block, one half-lit residence hall with stubborn elevators, and a horizon full of cranes. Friends at my previous college, Ashoka University, thought I’d gone mad.
What convinced me? A roll-call of backers—60-plus tech founders who had already built the kinds of companies I dreamed of launching someday. And a faculty roster that read like my Google-Scholar wish-list. If people from MIT, Berkeley, and Cambridge were willing to teach under the glare of work lights, the least I could do was learn under them.
While a crucial land bill crawled through the pandemic-stalled Punjab Assembly, we joked that we would study under a plaksha tree if we had to. Construction dust wasn’t a deterrent; it was the price of sitting at the launch-pad.
Laying the First Bricks (Year 1)
Inside that half-finished shell I discovered two things: how to write Python that didn’t crash, and how it felt to be known by name—by every professor. With no seniors to guide us, our faculty filled the gap—mentoring us in labs, celebrating festivals on campus, and even joining our cricket tournaments. It was never just lectures and grades; it felt like growing up in a campus-sized startup, with your mentors cheering from the pitch and the dining hall alike. “VC Fridays” became our weekly ritual—ten students and the Vice-Chancellor gathered over lunch to brainstorm clubs, dissect the course load, and debate everything from what was thriving to what needed a serious reboot.
Course experiments came thick and fast, which suited a founding batch. By semester’s end I’d topped the class and made to Dean’s List, but the real thrill was pitching my startup Yotta Expo: a digital-selling platform to help street-vendors fight wastage and compete with e-commerce giants. Two classmates and I moved into the computer lab and emerged—caffeinated and triumphant—with a working prototype which we then launched in Chandigarh and Prayagraj.
Roads and Rovers (Year 2)
Summer took me 5,000 km east to the Singapore University of Technology & Design. My task: make SimMobility simulate autonomous rovers on chaotic road networks. Debugging traffic models at 2 a.m. forced me to think in systems, not scripts—skills that later paid off in medical imaging.
Back on campus, the cranes had retreated and the elevators finally moved. But I had caught a bigger itch: could AI read the body as easily as it read streets?
Blood, Code, and California (Year 3)
Plaksha’s global network opened the next door—a six-month stint at UC San Diego, using deep learning to analyse micro-circulation. Hours in the lab taught me that medicine values empathy as much as accuracy. I learned to translate pixel patterns into questions doctors actually ask: “Is this vessel healthy?” That intersection—code and care—still drives me.
Sprint to the Finish (Year 4)
I set a personal dare in first year: run 5 km without gasping by graduation. Three Plaksha Marathons later, I now do it for fun—and for stress relief when experiments implode at midnight.
Academically, the final tally surprised even me: three international peer-reviewed papers, another Dean’s-List nod, and friendships with professors I once stalked online.
From Dust to Dream Labs
If you visit Mohali today you’ll struggle to imagine the mud days. Havells Block now mirrors Bharti; the HDFC Robotics Lab boasts an indoor test pool for submersibles and a ceiling tall enough for quad-rotors. Last semester a robotic dog clattered down the hallway—Boston Dynamics style—while first-years filmed it in awe. Part of me wants to re-enrol just to program that mutt.
The Road Ahead
Next stop: a fully funded Master’s in Computer Vision at MBZUAI, Abu Dhabi, ranked in the global top 10 for the field. The leap feels less scary this time; Plaksha already trained me to treat scaffolding as potential, not discomfort.
Would I Choose Plaksha Again?
In a heartbeat. The university grew from concrete skeleton to smart-lab skyline, and I grew alongside it—from a kid who wanted a shiny campus to a grad who values unfinished spaces, because unfinished spaces invite builders.
Thanks for reading. If you’re a prospective student wondering whether dust and disruption are worth the trouble, my answer is yes—provided you’re ready to add your own bricks to the blueprint. Feel free to reach out; I’ll be the guy jogging around campus whenever I’m back… probably trying to outrun that robotic dog.
Amol Harsh is a student of Class of 2025 pursuing BTech in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence.
