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'Never thought first benchers will be in Amazon': Google techie who taught college juniors

'One day, while I was teaching 'prefix sum', the lights went off but since everybody was so interested in the class, they used multiple flashlights and we finished the lecture,' the Google engineer said.

March 17, 2024 / 18:37 IST
Raj Vikramaditya is seen teaching his juniors coding with the help of flashlights in 2017. (Image credit: @striver/Twitter)

Raj Vikramaditya is seen teaching his juniors coding with the help of flashlights in 2017. (Image credit: @striver/Twitter)


An engineer with Google, who taught coding to his juniours while in college in West Bengal, on Monday proudly shared that the first benchers in his classes are now all software engineers working with Amazon.

What makes the feat more impressive is that the tier-3 institution, Jalpaiguri Government Engineering College in West Bengal, would rarely be approached by companies for placements.

Raj Vikramaditya, who goes by 'Striver' on Twitter, shared a picture clicked in 2017 when he was taking a class and wrote, "I never thought that the first benchers would be in Amazon. Picture from a class I took when I was in my second year. The power went off in the middle of a coding class, everyone got their flashlights on. Some moments stay in your heart forever, this was one of them."

He also shared a screenshot of a comment section on LinkedIn in which the then "first benchers" had commented with details of their current organisations visible next to their names.

Speaking to Moneycontrol, a former employee of Amazon himself who currently works with Google in Poland, Vikramaditya said, "Jalpaiguri government engineering college is a tier-3 college where no company would come for placements. There wasn't much support from the college faculty either, so the students took matters into their own hands, formed a coding club where seniors would take classes for the juniors after the official college hours. One day, while I was teaching 'prefix sum', the lights went off but since everybody was so interested in the class, they used multiple flashlights and we finished the lecture."

He added that powercuts were a regular feature at the college. But, elaborating more on the students' performance, Vikramaditya said that for a college with low rankings, these batches fared so well that the college now has some of the best placement records in the state.

Speaking about how students benefitted from the coding club, Vikramaditya told this publication, "A lot of people from 2021-2023 are working in Google, Amazon, Swiggy, JP Morgan, Microsoft, and other top tech companies. Most of these students were in the coding club, so the club was sort of a paddle shifter, people who joined the club went on to do great things."

Ankita Sengupta
first published: Jul 31, 2023 07:47 pm

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