Bit of a background

I would have never considered applying for a university in Sweden had I not been dating Aparna at the time. It was already 3 years of me trying to move to the US by applying for some Data Science related course. But with every passing year, my effort to get into a good university was heading downwards, my confidence was going down and I had almost given up. Just when I was about to give up my MS plans, I did get an admit from Michigan Technological University and I was hanging on with that admit, considering whether to go ahead and make the payment and reserve the seat or to wait for results from other universities. I was either getting reject after reject from every other university or I was missing the deadline to apply for one. Around that time was when I met Aparna. 

She had done her Master studies from Lund University in Sweden. During her final year, she had worked as an intern for close to 6 months at OECD, Paris. She had offer from UN to work in their office in Nigeria or Liberia or some similar sounding African country and going by what she mentioned (or what I could glean from what she mentioned), her role there would have been to conduct research and design suitable curriculum for students of that region that best serves their upliftment and integration into the modern world. However, given that was a risky job, she didn’t have total approval from her brother to move to that country. On the other hand she had an offer from JPAL back in India to work as project manager for some rural studies. She then came back to India, worked at JPAL for a year or 2, figured that the system was not as impactful in uplifting the lives of the rural people as much as she had expected it to be and not feeling satisfied by what she was doing, she left JPAL and moved to Bangalore. In Bangalore, she started a proprietorship called LingoEase and started working from home, partnering with a friend who was also working from her home in Delhi. The day I met her was on the 2nd year anniversary of LingoEase. Every single thing that she had done and achieved in her life up to that point was like a symphony to my ears. Such an inspiring journey she had gone through! Me on the other hand, graduated from a mediocre college named PESIT in 2014, somehow managed to get a job in a company called MuSigma before graduating (which I thought was a big achievement in and itself!), worked there for 2 years, switched to another company called MAST Global and had almost finished 2 years working in that company. That’s it! That was my story. Comparing our stories, I don’t know how I even managed to befriend her in the first place, let alone end up dating for the past 1 whole year. Anyhow, that’s a separate story in itself. 

My "Plan" for the future

So, when I told Aparna that my “plan” to pursue masters in the US and that I’ve got an admit from Michigan Tech, she got me to question my “herd mentality” attitude and enquired if I had done my due diligence or proper research before making that life changing decision. Turned out that I hadn’t done anything close to what can be called “research” into either the course or the college. Michigan State University was the one with a good reputation and better job prospects and not Michigan Tech. I didn’t even know where the college was. Until I had got the admit letter, I was convinced that MTU was in Chicago and that Michigan was the capital of Chicago! Who knew Michigan was a separate state in itself and MTU was in a small town which was in the northern part of that state. Weather was bad there, college was bad and my future would have been fucked! They basically admitted whoever applied. Aparna was not so keen on going to the US in the first place and asked if I had considered universities in Europe and up to that point I hadn’t. Last year April was when I started searching for universities in Europe. I applied for a few immediately. I did get an admit from the Erasmus Mundus BDMA (Big Data Management and Analytics) program, but that too without a scholarship. The course structure was designed such that I would be studying 4 semesters in 4 different universities. We were not too sure on how that would turn out and anyhow I had waited 4 years, so we thought that dedicating one more year to properly plan my future wouldn’t be too bad an idea. By then it was late June and we were high in the dating spirit. Time rolled like it was on a fast track and between work, home and relationship, I forgot to dedicate any quantifiable time on university applications. We did pick it up again in September and I made a list of many universities offering courses in the Data Science field. Our primary focus was Germany, since education is free in that country and job opportunities seemed pretty good too. I applied for 2 universities in Germany - University of Munich and University of Hildesheim, for the Spring semester. I did dedicate quality time and effort on these applications. We even joined German A1 classes. But then came the result from Hildesheim saying that my rank was around 165 within the list of applications they received and they had place only for 115 candidates. Strike 1! Munich was even worse. They said I don’t meet the prerequisite credits. Strike 2! Those were the only programs I had applied for Spring and both were out. There wasn’t even a scope of Strike 3. 

Considering Europe for higher studies

Fortunately, Aparna was not one to let me settle just with those 2 applications. Had it been me alone, I would have just applied for these 2 and waited for their results. Because, you see, I’m too confident about myself and I highly underestimate the competition out there! So, meanwhile, I had also applied for a few other universities. One under University Admission of Sweden, wherein I could apply for 4 Swedish universities at one shot. Here, I had initially applied to KTH, Chalmers, Gothenburg and Stockholm universities. Except for KTH, others in the list were nothing more than a random choice. I made the initial selection on the list of universities and at a later point, I was going through the program details and found out the program offered by another university called Linkoping University was more in line in terms of my interest. Aparna was inclined more towards KTH and Chalmers given the overall university ranking and hence I added Linkoping as 3rd in the list. For a good one month after creating the application I hadn’t  even submitted my motivation letter for Linkoping. Jan 15th was the deadline and I guess I only submitted the motivation letter for Linkoping by Jan 10th or so. For Stockholm University, which was 4th on my list, I didn’t submit the motivation letter at all. Negligence on my part. I know. I’ll remember this and will try not to repeat this again. Repeat what, you ask? Being negligent, taking things for granted, procrastinating? All of those, I would say. But only time will tell if I'm true to my word.

Meanwhile, I had also applied for a Stipendum Hungarian scholarship for which I had to select 2 courses of interest in any of the colleges in Hungary and submit an application to UGC (Indian Government’s University Grant Commission) to get nominated. Once nominated from UGC, the university for which I have applied would start their evaluation to see if I deserve the scholarship. Scholarship covered the entire tuition fee, accommodation and extra 300 euro as stipend. In this application I chose 2 courses offered by Eotvos Lorand (ELTE) university of Budapest - one on Computer Science with Data Science specialization and other on Autonomous systems. In the same university worked Anya (Reka’s mother and Reka is Aparna’s sister-in-law). I had a strange, yet comfortable feeling that Budapest would be my second home. Reka was more excited when I indeed got nominated from UGC and apparently that meant I'm almost 90% through to get selected. But, I wasn’t too sure at the time, nor was I sure as of this writing. Their evaluation process has already begun and it is quite a lengthy one. I have already given an interview, submitted a summary of my bachelor’s thesis, and worked on a programming exercise. I’m yet to finish the quiz and self evaluation survey. Post that, there still might be one more technical interview and only by end of June will I know if I have secured a seat in ELTE for one of the programs of my choice. That is indeed a rigorous selection process for a university with world ranking in the 500 to 600+ range! Anyhow, I’m determined to see it through and finish all the steps from my end. If nothing, it'll at least boost my confidence if I am offered a seat. For the time being, I'm 99% sure I was going to pursue my Masters at LiU.

Apart from universities in Sweden and Stipendum Hungaricum, I had also applied for the EIT Digital Master school program, which is a collaborative program between many participating universities. If selected in this program, we would spend the first year in the entry university, followed by a minor course on Entrepreneurship and then a specialization program during the 2nd year in one of the exit universities in a different country altogether. Seemed to be an interesting program structure and the tuition fee was economical too (around 12k euro per year). Aparna was not too sure about this, since she was concerned that spending 1 year each in a country would make it hard to find a job after the end of the course in either country. I had that fear too and quite frankly, I’m too amateur to realize the risk of not having a job at the end of my 2 year adventure. However, with Aparna by my side, I was afraid of nothing and I thought; everything would go as smooth as butter.

Around mid March when the tension was building since I had nothing much to do except wait patiently for the notification/results from Stipendum Hungarian, University Admission Sweden and EIT Digital Master and I started panicking. What if I don’t get into any of the above? Should I be just sitting and waiting or work on having a backup? Then I started exploring a few more options. Few more universities, few more countries. I tried Cyprus, Italy, Spain, Portugal and even Turkey (Aparna told me that Turkey doesn’t come under the EU! Bummer!). I had subscribed to newsletters from many universities, and one day, I received an email from NOVA IMS (a subsidiary of Universidade NOVA de Lisboa or New University of Lisbon) and it’s deadline for application was almost nearing. I had to pay around 51 euro for the application and had only a week before the deadline. Not wanting to risk having 0 backups, I filled the application form and paid the application fee too. It hardly took 1 day to complete the NOVA IMS application from scratch. I got an email the same day saying that I’ll be notified about the results within 15 days. I was a little wary given how easy it was to apply for this university and apparently it had better world ranking than the ELTE University of Budapest! Promptly in 15 days, I got another email from IMS NOVA that I got the seat! Yay! I finally had a backup! What a breather!! Next in line was the results from EIT, which was expected to come earliest by 27th March. On the 29th, they sent an email saying the results are delayed and we should expect them in a week or so. But, I had a backup now and I was least bothered.

Result Day

I was eagerly waiting for April 4th - the date of announcement of results from University Admissions, Sweden. When you have so many things going on in life, days seem to roll like seconds and while I was in the office that afternoon on April 4th, I got a notification that I have an email from the University Admissions. My heartbeat suddenly shot up a notch. With shaking hands I opened the mail and it read that the results are available and I can check them out by logging in to the University Admissions page. So I logged in and saw that I was put on reserve for KTH, that they had 76 seats and my waiting list number was 104. My heart sank. Aparna had such high hopes that I would be going to KTH. Second in my list was Chalmers and they had rejected my application long back since apparently I wasn’t eligible for their program as per their prerequisites. Third on the list was LiU and there I saw words written in green ‘CONDITIONALLY ADMITTED’! Conditionally? Oops! But the colour green gave me some hope. I read through and “conditionally” just meant that I had to pay the first instalment of the fee to confirm my seat, but I had made it. Yippee! No more confusion now! Sweden it is. The road to my future just took a deviation and my destiny was changed for good.