Bindu is 23 years old and from Hyderabad, India. She loves to play video games and learn languages--programming languages specifically. One of her hobbies is making greeting cards. She loves to make them for festivals.
As a child, Bindu’s father suffered from alcoholism and incurred a lot of debts. As a result, the family frequently moved. Bindu changed schools eight times. When she reached 9th grade, her father passed away.
After her father’s death, Bindu went with her mother and younger sister to the Centre for Social Service (CSS) in Andhra Pradash, an organization that provided them shelter, schooling, and meals. CSS had an all-girls school that Bindu attended.
CSS is an NGO partner with C2C. Every year, C2C chooses girls from CSS for sponsorships to assist them while in high school and at university. Bindu demonstrated a keen interest in computer science and by 10th grade, she knew she wanted to be a computer science engineer. Ms. Janaki and Ms. Lakshmi, two of the administrators at CSS, recognized Bindu’s ambitions and encouraged her to pursue her desired career path.
With a sponsorship from C2C, Bindu had her tuition and living expenses paid for while she pursued her Bachelor’s degree at Siddhartha Institute of Engineering and Technology in Hyderabad. When Bindu looks back at her time at university, she feels fortunate to have had her expenses covered. It allowed her to remain more focused on her studies. In addition, the C2C sponsorship granted her a bus pass to travel to other parts of the region with her mother and sister. With the bus pass, Bindu felt a new sense of confidence. Instead of only imagining a future where her life and duties solely existed within the home, the world stretched before her.
After she earned her Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Bindu interned at Vasavi College of Engineering. She noticed that there was off-campus hiring available for IT companies in the area, and she applied. Tech companies frequently do pre-employment evaluations in order to select from the best candidates. Around 4,000 people applied through off-campus hiring for IT companies. Bindu passed that round. She hoped to work in a multinational firm. She received offers from three companies and she decided to accept the offer from Cognizant Solutions, a multinational corporation located in Hyderabad. The application involved three rounds of interviews. In order to prepare, Bindu took matters into her own hands. She went online and found helpful mock interviews for added guidance. Thanks to her initiative, she landed the job.
Bindu has now worked at Cognizant for two years, doing coding for U.S. projects and communicating in English on a daily basis in the office. But while Bindu has achieved a dream, she still wishes to go further. She plans to one day go to the U.S. to get her Master’s degree in Computer Science.
For now, Bindu uses her free time to give back. She is part of the initiative Each One, Teach One. She returns to CSS to encourage the young girls to study and follow their passions. Bindu says,
“No one can do everything, but everyone can do something,”
Bindu is a young woman now, but her journey has taken her farther than she ever imagined. She believes that education is key to a promising future and she is forever grateful to C2C and the sponsorship that helped her earn a degree without worry about making money for tuition or her housing.