Born in the garden city of India-Bangalore, Nikhil completed his high school from J.S.S Public School and attended a pre-university course at the Vijaya Composite Pre-University College. Having secured a rank of 295 at the Common Entrance Test (CET)-2005, he opted for engineering in Electronics and Communication at P.E.S. Institute of Technology, Bangalore. Nikhil is currently in the 7th semester and has plans of pursuing Masters in Microelectronics and Ph.D in the same field at a reputed Engineering School overseas.
Nikhil at Intel® Campus
From his school days Nikhil had always wanted to become a scientist and was interested in research. He had made a lot of attempts in trying out something new that would contribute to society. Nothing had materialised as he did not get the necessary support or the right kind of people to help him. One summer morning, Nikhil’s classmate, Kiran S. Sajjanshetty, asked him to do a research project along with her. Little did he know that he would be working on the Intel® Scholar Program-2008.
Nikhil and Kiran had chosen Digital Signal Processor Architecture as their elective subject in the 6th semester and implementation JPEG algorithm on the DSP TMS320C54XX was one of the topics. As they went through the algorithm they felt that a change could be introduced in the processing technique of the JPEG algorithm so that a better compression could be obtained. It was then that they got a call for research proposals for the Intel Scholar Program and chose to submit this new algorithm titled ‘Advanced JPEG’ for the Intel Scholar Program.
Intel® Scholar Program (ISP) has had a great impact on Nikhil both academically and at a personal level. Before ISP, scoring high marks was his only priority and Nikhil used to dedicate most of his time for studies. But with this research project at hand, he learnt how to manage time. Nikhil learnt the technique of efficient planning and executing plans to near perfection. He learnt how to prioritise different tasks based on the complexity and the timing considerations.
ISP made him look at engineering in a more practical way. Nikhil learnt how different engineering concepts are practically applied. He was greatly influenced by the people he met at Intel, in particular his mentors Sudha Rengarajan and Sailesh Rathi. The amount of interest they showed in Nikhil’s research project and the amount of time they spent on the project inspite of their busy schedules taught him valuable lessons in Engineering Ethics.
This particular event has opened Nikhil’s mind to a whole new world about which he had always dreamt. It has propelled him to take up research as a serious career option.
