Life Update: College

Just a little bit of background about my college “situation”. How I went from design school in India to back to New Delhi to the University of Twente in the Netherlands. I wrote this post in March 2017 and updated it in December 2017.

I graduated from highschool in April 2016 and joined the Unitedworld Institute of Design (UID) in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, after working at the Government of Delhi for a month. UID was an excellent college for people who want to study design using the fundamentals of art.

The problem I faced at UID was that the first year, the Foundation, was really more art and design. Instead of design thinking and languages and designers, it was more about sketching and painting and artists. The way I think design should be taught, really what I feel design is, was very different from their philosophy. So, after two short months, I decided to drop out of UID. I moved back to Delhi and founded Oswald Foundation, the accessibility technology company I’m leading.

Oswald went on to become really great, and it mainly started with us winning Startup India Rocks! 2016 and I decided that it’s worthwhile. This January, I applied to a few universities I liked just to keep my options open, in case I wish to continue my formal education. Even though Oswald is going great, I figured it’s no harm in applying.

Accepted

• Digital Media at RMIT University
• Digital Media & Visual Communication at HTK Berlin
• Interaction Design at Harbour.Space University (1 year scholarship)
• Interaction Design at The Glasgow School of Art
• Information Technology with UX at University of Queensland
• Digital Media Design at University of Hertfordshire
• Applied Computer Science (Mobile Computing) at Sheridan College
• Interaction Design Arts at University of the Arts London’s College of Communication
• Interaction Design at California College of the Arts (Creative Achievement scholarship, $80,000)
• Interaction Design at Norwich University of the Arts
• Creative Technology at the University of Twente

Rejected

• Digital and Interaction Design at BTK University, Berlin, because I needed a foundation year to apply for that program. I did not know that.

Footnotes

University of Twente’s Creative Technology program is my absolute favorite right now. If I have to choose a course, I would pick this program because it’s the perfect blend of creativity/design, engineering, and computer science --- everything I love.

I did not apply to study to the US, except for CCA because it’s been my dream college since I was in sixth grade. I really loved the Interaction Design program at CCA when I was younger, but I see the parallels between UID and CCA in retrospect.

Update

In August 2017, I moved to Enschede, the Netherlands, and started studying Creative Technology at the University of Twente.