Reaching out for space

The sky is the limit for students who are willing to work hard, says this young achiever from NITT who is headed for ISRO

May 06, 2016 03:45 pm | Updated October 18, 2016 03:03 pm IST

Veerlavenkaiah Domma, an M.Tech student at National Institute of Technology Tiruchirapalli (NITT), will be working for Indian Space Research Organisation soon. Photo: M. Srinath

Veerlavenkaiah Domma, an M.Tech student at National Institute of Technology Tiruchirapalli (NITT), will be working for Indian Space Research Organisation soon. Photo: M. Srinath

Veerlavenkaiah Domma has traversed the distance from his native Janapadu village in Guntur district, Andhra Pradesh to Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) with just one vital tool in his kit: education.

The final year student of M.Tech (Communication Systems) at National Institute of Technology Tiruchirapalli (NITT), who is more popularly known as Venkatesh, has much to be proud of. He ranked 9th out of 30,000 candidates who attempted the national-level written test in October 2015 for the post of Scientist/Engineer in the country’s premier institute for space research and was among the 280 who qualified for the following interview round in February this year. And now, as he awaits his offer letter from ISRO (the preliminary intimation was sent by email), Venkatesh has some time to reflect on his journey.

The eldest son of farmers Venkatramaiah and Venkatalakshmi Domma, who grow paddy and chilli on their 2-acre field in Janapadu, Venkatesh also happens to be the only person in his family to have studied this far. “My younger sister studied up to the 10th class; my younger brother dropped out after the 7th. They are both married,” says 26-year-old Venkatesh.

And yet, as he often emphasises, he has been able to come this far, purely due to his academic excellence. “We have to believe our knowledge and subject, and get marks that are at least enough to secure a government quota seat. Otherwise higher education for poor people like us is unaffordable,” he says.

Venkatesh started his educational career in S.H.S Gurukulam, in his village run by the tutor K. Bikshapathi. He attended the Zilla Parishad High School (also in Janapadu) from Class 6 and completed his 10th there in 2005, standing first in the final exam.

Sri Krishna Chaitanya Junior College, Narasarao Pet, was where Venkatesh did his Intermediate (Plus 1 and 2). It was also his first exposure to English-medium learning.

“It is a common practice in our region for students to shift from Telugu to English medium in senior school, so the teachers treated us like complete newcomers to the language,” says Venkatesh.

“At first, they would take the lessons at a slower pace, and repeat the English words often. Of course, in Maths, language doesn’t matter. But in subjects like Physics and Chemistry, we had to learn many new English words. It was tough for the first four months, then slowly we all came on track,” he recalls.

Senior school was also where Venkatesh discovered his love for Maths. “Up to Class 10, I was very interested in Science. But after coming to Intermediate, I fell in love with Maths, mainly because of the interesting way my teachers taught the subject,” he says.

His academic success had the added advantage of getting him concessions on school fees.

Without any external coaching, Venkatesh wrote the state-level EAMCET engineering entrance exam in 2007, and was ranked 16,000 — enough to get him a government-quota seat.

“The rank made my father agree to my higher education, because the annual fee (Rs. 27,500) was affordable,” says Venkatesh, who did his B.Tech in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Malineni Lakshmaiah Engineering College, Singarayakonda in 2011.

Venkatesh joined NITT in 2014, with a Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE) score of 99.9 percentile. It was here that he discovered his passion for microwave engineering.

Used mainly for defence purposes up to the Second World War, this field of engineering — which harnesses electromagnetic waves in the range 0.001–0.3 m, shorter than that of a normal radio wave but longer than those of infrared radiation — has now spread to tele-medicine, space applications, wireless communications, remote sensing and even food science (such as microwave cooking).

Venkatesh distinguished himself early on by writing his own programming codes using a numerical technique to solve electromagnetic theory equations based on Maxwell’s equations (named after the Scottish mathematical physicist James Clerk Maxwell, who wrote about them in 1861-62).

“Very few students opt to study a core science like microwave engineering, because computers and information technology are much more attractive,” says his professor S. Raghavan.

“Venkatesh proved his talent from the first semester, when he didn’t use software (worth lakhs of rupees) to solve electromagnetic theory problems. Software makes it easy for someone without an in-depth knowledge of microwave engineering to solve problems. But a person who writes his own code based on a particular numerical method has to be knowledgeable not just in coding, but also in the basics of the subject. Venkatesh’s final results matched perfectly well with that of commercially available software tools,” he says.

The self-effacing Venkatesh says that it was the solid grounding that NITT gave him in microwave engineering which allowed him to do well in the ISRO interview. “Scoring high marks can help only in written tests. But for the interview, I was not even asked my name, only about what I was studying in microwave engineering at NITT.”

He hopes to bring his parents, who have never travelled beyond the temple city of Tirupati, to Tiruchi for the convocation ceremony in August. “They are very happy for me, even though they don’t know much about ISRO,” says Venkatesh.

0 / 0
Sign in to unlock member-only benefits!
  • Access 10 free stories every month
  • Save stories to read later
  • Access to comment on every story
  • Sign-up/manage your newsletter subscriptions with a single click
  • Get notified by email for early access to discounts & offers on our products
Sign in

Comments

Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.

We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of The Hindu and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.