From a Commerce Graduate to Software Developer at Airmeet — Madhuri Sonawat’s Story

26-year-old Madhuri Sonawat was born and brought up in Forbesganj, Bihar. She was raised with 4 other sisters in the house. As per the tradition at home, all the daughters had to sit at the father’s office space and help him with the business. Four of Madhuri’s elder siblings, soon after they graduated from college, followed this tradition until they got married and moved out.

When Madhuri’s time arrived, she followed suit and worked in the family business for some time. It was also a time when she saw her peers wanting to be more independent and to be working in jobs. Madhuri wanted to do something more for herself, than sitting in an office.

She recalls not being serious about having any kind of career in her childhood, and that she just had to complete her graduation for the sake of it. Being a commerce graduate, she went on to spend three more years preparing for competitive examinations, to become a Chartered Accountant or a Bank Officer. But her trials were in complete vain.

But during the later years of her teenage, Madhuri saw one of her sisters becoming a software engineer after getting married. She would come home for holidays and explain to Madhuri what she does and how shedoes it. Eventually, Madhuri started to pick up some form of interest in coding, and was observing the trends in the world. Her brother-in-law, who heard of Masai School from his friends, happened to introduce it to Madhuri. The couple encouraged Madhuri to give it a shot as well.

“Even school kids are starting to learn coding these days. And it is all bound to be the future, as everyone said. So I thought, why not give it a chance? This led me to apply to Masai School.”

Watch Madhuri talk about her journey in this video-

The Masai Experience

Madhuri opines that there was also a part of her who was really good at Math and Logical reasoning. When Masai released some pre-course material in Python, she immediately fell in love with the way she could play around with logic. Besides, the whole ‘Pay Zero Upfront Fee’(Income Share Agreement)concept really impressed Madhuri and compelled her to try Masai School since it was only a matter of 30 weeks.

She chose the Full-Stack Web Development course at Masai, and learnt Data Structures and Algorithms, HTML, CSS & Bootstrap, JavaScript along with MERN Stack, during the course. Calling the 9–9–6 system a systematic flow, Madhuri says a serious coder cannot afford to break this flow abruptly, even for a single day. In fact, as a full-time Developer that she is today at Bengaluru-based Airmeet, Madhuri still wakes up early in the morning and follows her Masai timings.

Not at all a morning person before Masai, and as someone who never had the concept of building a career in her mind, Madhuri sometimes feels guilty of not being productive on weekends and off-days.

“It is very important to inculcate a disciplined way to learn coding, and this involves being very patient and the willingness to do it over long hours. There is no way a serious software developer can be groomed without patience. Even I ended up making plenty of silly mistakes every other week. But the nicest part about it is that the Masai staff never made me feel like they were silly, and always supported me throughout the course.”

Her first interview after graduating from Masai School was with Airmeet and Madhuri cracked it with ease. Towards the end of her course curriculum, even before the final training module wrapped up, she landed a tech job. She goes on to add that the Masai curriculum moulded her in such a way that even when a new framework is introduced in her everyday job, she would pick it up really quickly and implement it with relative ease.