An alumnus of the 2001 dual-degree batch of IIIT Hyderabad, Vardhman Jain received the Outstanding Service Alumni Award for his role in spearheading the alumni fund-raising drives in India and abroad. We took him down memory lane.

As board member of the IIITH Alumni Foundation, Vardhman Jain continues to bring successive batches of graduates into the alumni fold in the Bay Area and Seattle, as thanksgiving for the profound impact that the institution had, on his personal and professional development.

It was at his father’s insistence that Vardhman joined IIITH, riding on a strong recommendation from a university professor in Jabalpur. “When I joined IIITH, I still had the notion in my mind that I had barely made it through the door and doubted whether I had the stuff that was required”, he reminisces.  When his classmates started introducing themselves with their high 10^th and 12^th class percentages, he quickly realized that everybody around him was very smart. “I had done some C programming in the past and I reckoned that I was, at least ahead of the curve there. By the 3rd class, I was completely lost. But the chemistry within our batch was so strong that we bonded over trying to understand the topics”, says Vardhman. 

After the initial hiccups in the first semester, “I developed a deep interest in Linux, thanks to our senior Sunil Mohan Adapa who was the go-to guy for Linux-linked queries. At that time, the trend was to buy a basic assembled computer from Abids, and Sunil and other seniors would teach us how to compile things, write programs and make the machine run”, he recalls. 

Vardhman, Maliha Maryam and Sandeep Patnaik worked on Prof. PJ Narayanan’s (PJN) project to create the PG admissions website. As RA and TA for multiple batches, he taught Computer Networking and IT Systems. He did image processing under Prof. PJN at CVIT, which was one of the strongest labs at that time. In his 4^th year, when he started the dual degree program, he had a bit of an existential crisis and was ready to quit. “It was amazing how empathetic PJN was“, he muses. “He told me to take a couple of weeks off and that did the trick. If at that time, he had played hardball, it would have been a breaking point. Many of us from my batch were heavily influenced by Prof. PJN and Prof. C V Jawahar”.

Vardhman was part of the first batch to join Google Hyderabad. After three years, he moved to Google Mountain View. Seven years later, he would explore the startup ecosystem at Logic hub, People AI and also co-founded another start-up. He rejoined Google recently as Senior Software engineering manager, leading teams delivering the AI compute infrastructure for Google Cloud customers.

“When I was at Google Hyderabad, I helped set up the match funding program and then carried it over to the US when I moved there”, says Vardhman. “That is when my alumni involvement increased.  The institute had reached out to us and in response, we started a fundraising drive as a group within Google. Over time, conversations began on how we could bring in other companies”.  

“At that time, whenever Prof. PJN visited Seattle or the Bay Area, he would drop us a message and the CVIT students, mostly, would initiate the alumni get-togethers”, says Vardhman. Just by word of mouth, 60-70 alumni would show up. Initially, a few of these meets happened within Google because there were a large alumni presence there. “The biggest events that we had, were thanks to Subhash Karri’s alumni networking skills and we were able to scale it up to 150 alumni and their families. Even last year, when PJN visited, we had an Alumni Meet but this time, we started nudging the juniors to take over the organizing and going forward, I think it will be easier to sustain”, observes Vardhman. 

“Initially, while we were trying to figure out the process, we connected to the US-based Beneviti for channeling donations”, he explains. It was Vivek Mandava who spearheaded most of the platform building and creation of the funding pipeline for the IIITH Alumni Foundation. “While I helped in drafting the documents and reviewing the feedback, all the heavy lifting was done by Vivek. Eventually, Vivek Mandava, Santosh Kodipaka, Vishesh Kumar, Shashi Kumar Penta, Sujit and I signed up as the first board of directors. It was a Bay Area kind of thing and a moment of great accomplishment! Google had a matching fund scheme and we became one of the top donors. Vivek looped me in for the fundraising aspect where I participated the most. My role was in organizing events, guiding alumni on the various means to donate funds to accrue benefits and generating receipts after donations”.  

“When I graduated from IIITH, the main thing was that it shaped me as an engineer.  The curiosity and interest in problem solving is the most exciting part of the job and that’s what transferred over”, says Vardhman. “Even from the initial days, getting that machine from Abids, configuring it ourselves and writing the code to run on it, that curiosity and excitement in building something up, still remains strong”.