My Carnegie Mellon journey has come a full circle
On January 11, 2025, I got a call from Dean Bill Sanders from Carnegie Mellon School of Engineering. He called to congratulate me for winning the CMU College of Engineering Alumni Service Excellence Award. I am humbled. The call had me reminiscing…
I graduated from college in 1998. I got a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Electronics & Communications from REC Trichy. I had a degree in ECE, but I wasn’t sure if I even knew how solid-state circuits worked. That’s when I started to feel a little paranoid about my career.
Back then, almost every student around me was taking either the GMAT (for MBA admissions) or the GRE (for US grad school admissions). I decided to take the GREs, not because I wanted to apply to US grad schools that year, but because of my aforementioned paranoia and mostly for FOMO reasons.
After college, I worked at IBM for 10 months, writing some serious VHDL code for chip design & verification, which ironically helped me make my decision to quit the corporate and go study further. I realized that I didn’t understand why I was writing this code. Or, how did the code I wrote turn into a real chip that went inside the mainframe computer I was writing the code on? It was like black magic to me, at that time. I decided to apply to US grad schools, mostly to study and understand the physics, chemistry and maths around me. I’d be lying if I said that my decision was purely driven by my intellectual curiosity. Going to the US was a big deal for a middle-class young Indian like me in the late 90s. It was a rite of passage, a milestone of success, a path to riches, and something to show off, which played some part in my decision-making. So, I started applying.
Three months into the application process, I narrowed my search down to 6 universities. Carnegie Mellon and Berkeley were my top picks, UT Austin and WUSTL were my middle choices, and SUNY Buffalo and Clarkson were my “safe schools.” I applied to all of them. As was the norm those days, I kept my application process super secret. I’d spend most evenings, way past midnight, researching schools or emailing research advisors. Other than the US News university rankings, email conversations with research advisors was my predominant method for selecting universities. I was making good money at IBM, so I didn’t have to worry about paying for the internet (internet was not free, nor cheap, in India in late 90s) or about the university application fees. And buying that one-way plane ticket to the US wasn’t a problem either. But the catch was that I couldn’t afford paying for a 2-year Master’s degree in the US. I needed a scholarship to study there.
I was feeling pretty confident about my chances at those 6 universities, but then a group of friends showed up at our Bangalore residence one evening. One of them accidentally saw my list of 6 and yelled out, “Are you seriously applying to these top schools?!” Paranoia! I had done my homework, and I knew I had a decent shot, but still. Being paranoid had helped me prepare myself better, yet…Ironically, I got admitted into my top 2 and bottom 2 choices, but the middle two rejected my application completely. Berkeley offered me a 40% scholarship, but Prof. Shawn Blanton from Carnegie Mellon University gave me a full scholarship for the master’s program. So, I made my decision. The rest, as they say, is history!
My time at CMU can be roughly divided into three phases: start, middle, and finish. At the beginning, I was paranoid about failure at CMU. I felt like I was surrounded by super smart people, and most of them seemed to understand complex concepts much faster than me. I felt like I had to work twice as hard to succeed in that environment. So, I did just that — I worked 16-hour shifts every day in my first year at CMU. I got diagnosed with RSI in my right wrist to show for it — even though I’m a right-handed person, I still use a left-handed mouse almost 20 years after leaving CMU — but by the time I reached the ‘middle’ phase, I no longer felt that paranoia, and that made everything worth it!
My middle phase at CMU was all about learning. I learned how to read papers, how to think like a researcher, how to try to come up with new ideas and fail, how to write research papers, how to present my work, how to manage my time, and how to be a good listener. This was the phase where I also did a couple of internships at IBM. I got some real-world experience and was amazed by the people solving real problems. They rarely went into the simulations world I was so accustomed to — why would they when they had access to real data? And they were making a lot more money, for doing a lot less work than I!
My middle phase at CMU was also very personal. I met Priyanka in Pittsburgh, fell in love with her, and got married. I will admit that getting married in the middle of a PhD was a bit distracting, but ‘we’ made it work. My journey had become ‘our’ journey.
My paranoia at this stage was that I would never graduate. I would envy my peers getting their doctoral degrees. I knew I had to buckle down. I had to learn to separate my research life from my personal life. One more stripe was earned!
The last part of my CMU journey was the most adventurous. By then, I was super confident in my skills — learning, reading papers, writing papers, and presenting my research. After those two internships, I had convinced myself that my research was not pragmatic, with no real-world value. I thought the industry would never use the stuff I was dreaming up in my simulations. I was so full of myself that I refused to write my dissertation, even though I had completed most of the research and coding. Paranoia had been replaced by over-confidence — never a good thing! Shawn would often remind me of the value of my work and how I wasn’t thinking about the long-term impact of my original research. Our weekly one-on-ones were always about the same thing: “Just write your dissertation, Rao!” I almost left CMU without my doctoral degree, and it looked like I might end up with an ABD (All But Dissertation). But two people stuck with me, believed in me, and pushed me to finish what I had started — my advisor, Prof. Shawn Blanton, and my wife, Priyanka. If it weren’t for them, I’d have probably regretted that decision for the rest of my life. I did leave CMU and joined IBM in the fall of 2005, but I eventually wrote my dissertation in the spring of 2006 and successfully defended my research thesis in May 2006.
Five years later, I realized that the groundbreaking work Shawn and I had been working on for years had become incredibly popular in the Electronic Design Automation community. Everyone was talking about it at test conferences, and it was being implemented in chip test and debug flows. I felt a mix of regret, envy, and pride. I regretted not listening to Shawn almost 8 years ago when he kept telling me how valuable my original work was. I envied those who made derivatives of our idea become commercially successful. But I was also proud of what I had accomplished. And I was grateful to Shawn for getting my name on a US patent and pushing it through the USPTO. I’ve had a few patents since graduating from CMU, but none of them were as special as the first one.
By the end of my time at CMU and after working in a related field for 5 years, I no longer felt ‘uneducated’. I’m humble enough to know that there’s always something new to learn. But I’m also confident to pick up a new subject and learn it well to make a meaningful impact in a short amount of time. I have CMU and its education system to thank for giving me that confidence. At the risk of sounding bombastic, I think I write well, can read research papers fast, am rarely overwhelmed by new trends popping up around me, and most importantly, am not shy to express my professional opinions in any corporate or academic setting. The grind of doing research with Shawn left indelible traits in me, many of which I now know, have become the building blocks of my professional personality.
On January 11, 2025, I got a call from Dean Bill Sanders from Carnegie Mellon School of Engineering. He called to congratulate me for winning the CMU College of Engineering Alumni Service Excellence Award and to invite me to the Award ceremony at CMU in April 2025. It is humbling, and I’m so grateful for the opportunity to represent CMU. Being part of the 35,000 living alumni (Dean Sanders shared this statistic) of the Carnegie Mellon School of Engineering is a huge honor. When I first joined CMU in 1999, I never imagined I’d be pursuing a PhD from such a prestigious institution. Even when I graduated, I didn’t fully understand the importance of that degree. Looking back on all the small things I did as an alum — from serving on PhD dissertation committees to sharing my industry experiences or contributing a small part in the creation of a new Manufacturing Data Science course at CMU — I never thought of those as anything special or worthy of recognition. For me, they were just ways to contribute and give back, as I feel deeply indebted to CMU for providing the best education I could have ever hoped for.
Recently, I was having a drink with a couple of colleagues, when CMU and Professor Blanton’s name came up. They asked me why I held my advisor and the school in such high regard. My quick response was, “Shawn fed me in the US! If it weren’t for him and his belief in me, I wouldn’t have this degree nor the job I have today. I would’ve probably made it in life, but I wouldn’t have had this education, or the pride I carry with me now.”
What I learned during those six years at CMU is immeasurable. This Alumni Service Excellence Award from Carnegie Mellon School of Engineering has brought me to a full circle in my CMU journey. Thank you to all those who believed in me and have supported me on this wonderful journey. It’s not done, of course. I am still on it!
