Having worked at a coal company and a bank, how Rohit Goyal — a Biotech Engineer — finally discovered his passion to become a developer

“Nothing is really impossible when you learn to put yourself under a disciplined routine and take up challenging tasks. I did not feel that I was ever contributing to anything meaningful throughout my career. But now as a web developer, I feel very empowered and content with what I am doing in my job.”

Rohit Goyal’s career took multiple turns before arriving at software development. He was a Growth Strategist at a startup, an Assistant Bank Manager, an Operations Manager at a Coal Corporation. It took him almost 8 years to figure out that he wanted to be a developer all along. Today, he takes pride in his achievement of becoming a full-time web developer with only a few months of learning at Masai School.

Calling himself shy and introverted, Rohit says he did not participate in a lot of extracurricular activities in his school days. Born and raised in Sri Ganganagar, Rajasthan, he recalls not having clarity around what he really wanted to pursue later in his career. But he was certain that he wanted to be successful in whatever he was doing, and thereby empowering and leading a team.

After his high school, Rohit took up Math and Science. Later, he went to Punjab University to pursue his engineering in Biotechnology and graduated in 2013. Finding it difficult to cope up with this stream of education, Rohit started his career as an Operations Manager, and decided to stay away from Biotechnology. He admits that the zeal to do something in Science always stayed.

Learning about Masai School from his elder brother who constantly encouraged Rohit to learn to code, he went on to take a break from his career and give Masai School a shot.

Here’s Rohit talking about his journey with Masai in the video-

The ISA Payments System

To reduce the burden of student loans for engineering students, Masai School operates on an Income Share Agreement (ISA) where the students pay zero upfront cost. Once they graduate from the course, the students will pay back 15 percent of their monthly income for 36 months, or until they reach a maximum capped amount of INR 3 lac.

However, the Income Share Agreement is applicable only when the students get a job offer with a package of INR 5 LPA or more.

Coding at Masai School

The 9am to 9pm routine was hard to keep up with for Rohit, but eventually, it became a routine of normalcy. He goes on to add that the level of discipline Masai imbibes in someone helps students go a long way in their careers, irrespective of what work they do.

“I took the Full-Stack Web Development course. We were given the problem statement for the project by 10am after the scrum, and needed to build a project by 6pm the same day. I was able to get comfortable with other peers in the course very quickly, and built many projects throughout the course.”

HTML, CSS and JavaScript was what Rohit started off with. But when the curriculum reached React.JS, he struggled to keep up the same pace for a while. But all it took was the constant support, motivation and mentorship offered by the staff at Masai School- he adds.

The course was just enough for Rohit to land a job at a growing technology company. But what Masai focuses on teaching the students, according to him, is how one can maintain this level of learning curve and keep improving it even after graduation. At Unlu, where Rohit now works, he is given responsibility for end-to-end development and deployment, and he says he has no trouble keeping up with deadlines.

In his college, Rohit was quite afraid of the entire notion of sitting in front of a system and code. Until Masai School, he spent most of his work life meddling with spreadsheets, documents and only emails. During his orientation day itself, he had his doubts and questions but upon advice from CEO Prateek and CTO Nrupul, he started to believe that he could become a serious software developer in only a few months even with zero knowledge in coding.

He recalls being really bad at giving job interviews ever since he graduated from college. Rohit would do his job just fine on a daily basis, but having to sit in front of a recruiter and give an interview seemed dreadful for him. Cofounder Yogesh and SVP Ankur stepped in to help Rohit surpass this challenge.

From mock interviews to FAQs to involved mentorship in the process, Rohit says he had learnt much more than cracking these interviews at Masai. His confidence levels rose up drastically after he learnt public speaking, how to excel at a tech company as a developer, how to be independent and learn by himself.

“Nrupul simplified the whole process for me, and showed me how exactly the entire system works when it comes to coding. After a few discussions with him, I stopped looking at coding the same way I did. Even today, whenever I need help with career direction or tech, I still reach out to Ankur and Albert to get some insights. I have to admit that Masai has helped me and has invested in me thoroughly even a year after I graduated from the school.”