EP 4: ‪@Mayur_Takalkar‬'s Journey from INDIA to USA | Clemson University | Tesla

what brings you to help so I had this notion that Germany is like very good for mechanical engineering why did you come to us like the immigration is tough it's very costly my primary motivation to come to the US was money American Dream H what was the trigger point for you when you decided to pursue your masters from some ofad countries like USA I like the work culture more where I'm working currently it's very cliche uh uh no island or anything let's tell the audience the truth why I'm here like honestly I'm here to pick up your car to take it from California to New York for vak and honestly there are two reasons why I'm here one is that I really love California I've been here for eight nine months and second is I really love driving so driving from coast to coast is what brought me here are you excited for the cross country Drive definitely really looking forward to it so just to give you all an perspective like May's last attempt we are still waiting for that whether his hmb would be picked or not so we are at the crossroads like whether he will be in us or not in us and all that stuff soting times yes just to start like I want to know what's the typical immigration process like for a student like how does the Visa start like which Visa you are on I was working on FN OPD okay stem opt um just to give like general idea about Visa when you come as a student you come on F1 CPT Visa MH uh until you graduate at F1 CPT you can do internships on CPT uh F1 CPT uh once you graduate it's F1 op CPT is curriculum practical training opt is optional practical training like you working after your Masters is optional option that's how you come and it's typically for three years I think it's divided into op and then stem op if you are a student from stem then you get um extension um so now I'm currently on my F1 stem op okay um and I'm applying for my H1B Visa which is basically the work visa the trickest part of H1B Visa it's a random selection also called as Lottery uh based system uh so there are pool of candidates one is General candidates and one is like Master's cap um and from this both categories um the selection that is done is completely random that makes the US Visa process uh tricky uh there is after uh H1B um uh we're not getting into that today there is something called i140 approvals there is something called bom process there's something called Green Card process this is the these are some of the Milestone that follow when when we talk about us immigration so this is something about the Visa and how it works in us now let's go back to start and go go a few years back to to your bachelor's experience in India can you explain the audience in brief and what were some of the biggest learnings for you um my biggest learning from my bachelors um I did my bachelor in mechanical engineering back in pun University um and uh some of my biggest learnings are I think I learned a lot while uh participating in robotics events like building uh some small Bots for robor races um uh for for for robots for for for robots to perform some tasks uh I went to different colleges um participated in uh some events in I Bombay I think this traveling and learning experience was really good for me knowing going talking to people competing learning you know the entire Journey taught me a lot um I uh in my bachelor in some of my basic mechanical engineering subject um I uh really liked some of the professors um um like engineering Graphics we had a professor called Arun Kumar who also happened to write the book during like one of the textbooks and he was very influential he taught us engineering Graphics without we drawing or we we drawing anything in his class it was just listening and just visualizing that was very interesting as a like a student from first year engineering Fe um apart from this I also happened to be the general secretary in my final year this gave me a good exposure to like the interpersonal skills um and uh talking to people being around like staff members organizing events uh and so on and um uh I think I learned a little bit on that end so these were some of the key learnings apart from the academics that you learn and the projects that you do Etc I did my final year project in Industry which gave me some insights into how like you know a medium Scale Company would operate um they used to make uh some automation or special purpose machines MH for welding processes basically so yeah this was my bachelor's uh so to say experience yeah you had a great experience it seems because for me I didn't Focus much on the extracurricular things like mostly it was about academic because I had a lot of travel like 2 hours of travel from a home to college so it was just about attending lectures going back eating sleeping and repeating so really good to hear you developed a lot whether it's academically also interpersonal skills like talking to people being a general secretary and so yeah even my experience was similar I I think my college was an hour uh like one and a half hour away oh I've traveled to my college with all modes of Transport like college bus like from the local train um uh with my own bike I think and like some other small patches here and there but like yeah it was it was slightly far for me as well which was like draining in terms of energy uh yeah but but in short this means that may was more dedicated than me like we had the same situation but still you focused more on that so that's a good thing uh now I want to know like how was your transition from your bachelor's to working starting full-time in India can you transition some yes um the the transition was I think um it it it involved lot of learnings I think um as a student there were lot of things which um which I was was not like sure about how it works in corporate life uh especially the corporate lingo uh you know how to write like formal emails how to be in like very uh let's say you know in a in a in an operational environment um how does it work and so on um I so that was like a very very good uh learning from me there were a lot of like how to say like cultural shocks like corporate cultural shocks that I had um in terms of um uh how do you communicate a specific thing uh in a professional environment uh not to say that it was also like Indian work environment and um uh work environment in production is different in a manufacturing typical company is different compared to any corporate like uh environment let's say which is in a typically office setting um I learned a lot about like etiquettes uh you videos were my to go like you know to go option or like friend and uh I think I tried to watch videos for as many things as possible me it'd be like uh anything and everything yeah it is a great source like you can almost find solution to every answers every questions that you have so that's a good source yeah it was it was really interesting uh yeah these were I think some of my keyar key things when I transitioned from uh bachelor's to my masters I got like campus placed okay um and uh initially I was like G ET like graduate engineer training and uh I was rotated in different departments so this transition involved me working in production environment and actually near machines Gathering some data solving like the actual problems that they have dealing with uh operators or people who are working in that manufacturing setup from like three decades four decades um and trying to solve a problem which they have seen from yours so uh I was like kind of uh learning through struggling um and then uh trying to make most out of the opportunity that I had on hand I think I also worked in quality at some point and I also worked in Human Resources training so I got like a well-rounded uh experience uh in that transition so to say Indian experience has definitely taught you a lot and uh I want to know like because I haven't worked any any full-time in India so you have worked both in India as well as us so how can you compare like how is the work culture there versus in us and what are are some of the differences that you faced um I think uh work culture is slightly different uh for sure uh I like the work culture more where I'm working currently uh I currently work at Tesla and um I also the roles are different um uh I think in in like currently um I think um I own some commodity uh and and uh I think my calendar can be planned um one of the one of the key differences that I can spot in work cultures is there's a lot of phone being used in um in the Indian company that I worked or maybe in a typical Indian setup um that's not a thing in the US um so I like that part it gives you freedom to work uh you know so at you you have some peace of mind it's not a lot of phone calls that happen around communication is through email you mean most of the communication uh internally can be uh through some uh like let's say uh apps like teams or like some similar messaging apps uh and there can be like meetings which are scheduled um mostly most of the time they're scheduled and some are like ad hoc um the organization is mostly flat uh in like us companies uh like uh not many people would even in higher in the order would have keins um so you would have your manager sitting next to you your like directors or senior director sitting next to you they're very approachable U there are like no walls that separates them so you know like that creates uh a good working environment that's slightly different in um I I think where I worked in India in India okay so now you know that working in us has some advantages but when you were IND you obviously didn't know about this so what was the trigger point for you when you decided to pursue your masters from some abroad countries like USA what was your motivation or trigger point where you thought because you worked for three years so how did you decide I think I I think I kind of thought of pursuing my masters when I was doing my bachelor's itself um like it was mostly I want to do I want to specialize in um some field and uh Germany was very attractive um uh option like some courses were really attracting me at that point um I had this notion that Germany is like very good for mechanical engineering and some courses um I thought were like would be really helpful for me so this is when uh this idea was planted and um uh there was no like definite trigger point but it was mostly like you know let's complete the bachelor's and let's get a master's degree so that you know you get like uh MSN some specialization not to end in like the umbrella as a mechanical engineer so you already added pre-planned you said you decided it in bachelor's bachelor's I had that as one of my options here because for me I didn't have anything planned like my plan was to get my ma bachelor's done get in some job do some internships or maybe business like I wasn't really sure but then covid happened and one of my friends almost convinced me why it's better to go abroad instead of India like whether it's pay the standard of living and the quality of life so to be really honest like my primary motivation to come to the US was money like earning huge money and that was it but good to know that you had had it planned out to pursue our masters and one one question like as you said like Germany is a to go country for automobile or mechanical engineer so why did you come to us like the immigration is tough it's very costly so why did you choose us over Germany um I I did apply to Germany in one of the years uh and I wanted to get into like a University in Germany uh I thought the universities that I landed in my first year of application um I didn't get the universities that I wanted to uh I wanted to land a t Tu and in the second year so I thought it is good for me to look at I thought it is good to be more core specific okay uh course specific that is if you're trying to pursue your Masters in some field uh let's go for the best university no matter what the location is I also learned through experience uh of some of my friends at that point is uh I had a notion that Masters in US is expensive way more expensive than it is in Germany and um that wasn't true is what I learned from my friends's experience like if you get scholarships if you find like jobs you can still balance it out you don't have to go for an Hefty loan at that point um so that was one of the biggest things I think the financial part of it uh the the second part of it was uh us sorry Germany courses are subsidized uh but most of the German courses are subsid subsidized at least at that point is what I found if the course was um not that expensive it was either completely in German or half thought in German and we learned German uh only to you know survive in Germany not to like uh get education in German language so that was one of the biggest things that learned while applying or in the middle of the process and I was like oh damn like um it's I've come too far to you know change the direction now um but still I was able to do that and hence I applied both in US and Germany and I happened to land u in Like Us automotive uh course yeah all right so you did your Ms in automotive engineering from Clemson University I believe it's in South Carolina so can you tell more about the Master's experience like how is it to study in America living the American dream can you share some of your biggest learnings some drawbacks that you faced during our masters in US American dream huh um uh my Master's experience um uh I think really shaped me um uh in a really good way um I I started my Master's uh in August 2019 uh and uh as you said like uh this is a university like Clemson University U this was Automotive campus which was which was a satellite campus slightly away from the main campus uh in the City of Greenville uh this was a nice like little town um there was lot of help initially to be settled and to you know be comfortable initially uh from people around there um we lived uh near campus um and uh I think um the hor learning experience was uh quite industry focused there were different verticals uh to name a few power Trin um autonomous uh manufacturing yeah the there were different like uh area of uh Focus uh I was into uh manufacturing for some point my major was was um automotive engineering and minor was into uh Manufacturing in my masters I also ped lot of different courses like um uh I did some management courses as well I did some programming courses as well the projects were very good um uh my course was like 42 credits minimum it had like four courses a semester which was quite heavy I think because for us it was 307 30 credits in order to graduate 42 might definitely be a lot yeah it was like slightly higher um but yeah and uh in the middle of my masters um covid um happened oh so you faced both the pre-o as well as postco yeah my one and a half semester was pre-o uh and the semesters after that were like postco from Summer uh mostly I would say I I remember end of the spring the exam was announced which just online the courses went online uh and that is when I think Co was kicking in uh at its peak uh yeah uh apart from it I think I I in order to support myself financially I was working initially at uh Panda Express dining dining job I can I can yeah it was like an on campus job where I where I cooked some Chowan some doain and we served we also cleaned um yeah that is what we did um later I happened to uh find find an research assistantship um and uh I worked on a BMW project we were developing a smart glove for them um and it was really exciting fether resources uh I think resources were uh you could mostly get whatever you would ask as far as it is reasonable and you could order as many things as you want to experiment and like you know make progress on the project most of the universities I think focus a lot on Research like so they give you all the resources it's about just being willing to learn and explore new ideas so I think it's the case for most of the universities in US yes providing that support yeah and experiencing that firstand was was really nice wow yeah can you recall some of the cultural shocks like I can think of some like uh the tissue papers here mean different than in India like if you go to some restaurants in India you ask for tissue papers but here they say it napkins so that's really embarrassing and second is the Tipping system like I didn't know we had to uh give tips to the waiters and all like back in India we don't so can you recall some of the cultural shocks you faced uh that's very cliche uh uh no I don't recall anything