Share this post

Towards the end of his first semester at Columbia University, Gundeep Bindra got a mildly reproachful mail from his dean. It went,

Hey Gundeep, you’ve got a 2.7 in your semester and the minimum requirement to graduate is a 2.6. We are concerned about your studies. Is there anything that we as a department can do to help?…

It was something that hit Gundeep hard. He’d made a mistake. He’d thought that he could get away with last-week studying, pulling all-nighters just the way he used to back in India. But studying in the US is different. And at Columbia, even more so! As he calculated his GPA at the end of that semester, he realised he’d lost a 5% here, a 10% there in assignments that he’d been careless with. Never again, he vouched. Next semester on, he worked hard at each assignment, project report, case study and what have you.

With that kind of commitment, Gundeep ultimately finished with a 3.7 over 4 CGPA in MS Computer Science. He made it to Microsoft Corporation as one of the youngest Product Managers ever. Well bro, lessons learned the hard way are the ones that stay!

Share this post