I was lucky to have parents who didn't force me into anything. When I was 10 years old, I was fascinated to see a bulb light up using a battery and to see the motor rotate in different directions based on battery polarity. I was curious and wanted to understand how the bulb and motor works. That's when I decided to study electronics.
So after finishing my 10th, I opted for the science branch with electronics. I learnt about logic gates, analog electronics, Maxwell's right and left hand rule, transistors, resistors, capacitors and all the basic electronics 101.
Once I had the basics in and learnt how to meddle with circuits on a breadboard, my love for electronics grew and decided to chose "Electronics & Communication Engineering" for my graduation studies. The first two years were great as I meddled more with electronic circuit, but I didn't enjoy the course towards the end, as it got heavy into VLSI chip design and signal processing.
After my graduation I got placed in 2 companies - Tata Consultancy Services and Tata Elxsi. I chose Tata Elxsi despite a lower package since it had departments in electronics and system integration. I was 22 yrs old.
All these years, Computer science was in the dark to me. In my first year at Tata Elxsi, I got to work on the 4G firmware code that was written in C. This year was a crucial year where I learnt about programming which set me up on the journey in the field of software engineering. I fell in love with this field once I realised that software is just a beautiful and malleable abstraction of how you arrange transistors on a circuit board.
In computers and software I saw the sheer amount of design and intelligence put into it at different layers of the stack making the magic of converting the bits and bytes to the digital world that we experience.
Because of my background in electronics, I don't see magic, I am able to envision and see all the layers of how a computer works down to the bits and bytes.
Do I wish I studied CS in my BTech? Nah. I'd still pick electronics. Because I went to it because that's what l wanted to do once I saw a battery and a bulb.
PS: When I look back at the journey, I realise that it was not electronics or computers that I am in love with. It's with building stuff. It's with the process of creation.