6 min readNew DelhiUpdated: Aug 2, 2026 10:22 AM IST
My father had a line he used often: ‘Jack of all trades, master of none, still better than master of one’. He worked in distribution and marketing for watch companies like HMT and Sonata, and believed that a person who could move across domains, that is, someone who refused to be boxed in by a single skill, would always have more to offer than someone who only ever went deep in one direction. He is no longer here, but I carry that philosophy with me everywhere.
Last year, IIT Hyderabad gave Guna Shekhar Reddy a gold medal for it.
I am in the final year of my MTech in Techno-Entrepreneurship at IIT Hyderabad. I came here through GATE after completing my BTech in Mechanical Engineering at Vasavi College of Engineering, Hyderabad. In undergrad, my CGPA was 7.27. At IITH, it is 9.51. That gap is not just about studying harder; it is about finally understanding what a CGPA actually means and what it shapes going forward.
Growing up in Hyderabad
I was born in Nagaram village in Suryapet district, but I grew up in Hyderabad and did all my schooling there at Johnson Grammar School, Habsiguda, on the ICSE curriculum, from LKG all the way through Class 10. My mother is the Head of the Department of Commerce at St Pious X Degree College in Nacharam. My father, before he passed away, spent his career in watch distribution and marketing, and it was he who gave me the philosophy that I have tried to build everything around.
One thing I got lucky with is geography. IIT Hyderabad is technically in Sangareddy. It was about three hours from home, but it is close enough that I travel back most months to spend time with my family and friends. That connection has meant a great deal, especially this past year.
Getting to IIT through GATE
My path to IIT was through GATE rather than JEE. During the Covid years, I went deep into the world of entrepreneurship, reading, following the space, trying to understand what it actually takes to build a company. What fascinated me was how genuinely hard it is, how much there is to learn, and how much I wanted to take that risk properly. When I came across the Techno-Entrepreneurship programme at IITH, it felt like exactly what I was looking for.
What got me through GATE preparation was not brilliance but consistency. My mock test scores were not always great, but I kept at it without slowing down, and that steadiness carried me through in the end.
First time living away from home
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I joined IIT Hyderabad in August 2024. My undergrad college was close to home and had mostly local students, so coming to IIT was a real culture shock, in the best possible way. Everyone in my department seemed to be from a different state. Meeting people from other countries came a bit later, and that opened up an entirely different way of thinking.
What surprised me most about IIT was the freedom — freedom of thought, freedom to pursue many things at once, freedom to be interested in domains that had nothing to do with your department. People from completely unrelated fields talking openly and passionately about their work. I found I could stay involved in a few clubs at a time, pick up working knowledge across different areas, and let each one inform the others, exactly the way my father had always described a life well-lived.
The CGPA that finally made sense
The jump from 7.27 to 9.51 is not something I take lightly or explain away easily. In undergrad, I simply did not understand what a CGPA means or what it shapes later. At IITH, that clarity came early. Once I genuinely grasped what was at stake — not as pressure, but as understanding — the effort followed naturally.
It eventually came together in the Academic and Co-curricular Excellence Award, a gold medal for balancing strong academic performance with co-curricular work spanning many different domains. My father’s line is still the best way I know to describe how I approached it.
Solving a real problem on the shop floor
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My MTech thesis is a hybrid physics-ML screening platform for cold-forging die design. I did not begin with a theoretical problem statement — I began by visiting casting and cold-forging industries near campus, looking for something that was actually hurting people on the ground.
What I found was this: Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) make up roughly 85 per cent of India’s casting and cold-forging market, but lose 10 to 15 per cent to defect-driven cost overruns. The simulation software that would catch those defects early costs upwards of one crore a year, which is out of reach for almost all of them. So they absorb two to four-day simulation cycles per design iteration, and a shop that could serve 40 to 50 clients a year ends up serving 20 to 30.
The platform I built screens die designs before the full simulation runs, catching likely failure modes earlier in the design loop. The prototype is working and currently in industry validation, with SME design teams testing it against real die geometries and defect data. It won an IITH_BUILD grant of 20,000 rupees from a cohort of over 100 pitches. For the fieldwork, I did onsite research at Vedantha Tools, Tyche Diecast and Eqic Industries, and travelled to Pune, Chennai and Bengaluru.
When people ask how I got design engineers to actually talk to a student, the answer is simple: I went and asked. I approached 10 companies and requested access. The hardest part right now is adoption — the platform sits on top of what teams already do, so the value is not obvious until someone has actually used it.