Summer Arc 2026
I had a very long vacation after the completion of my course at ICAS Manipal, where this vacation was a complete roller coaster moment there were days where I s...
I had a very long vacation after the completion of my course at ICAS Manipal, where this vacation was a complete roller coaster moment there were days where I sat non stop working at the same time there was a time I didn't much do a lot of hands on work.
One major thing which I did during this vacation was changing my principles on how I would like to build and code in comp sci projects. As previously I was a very frigid manner of building web dev projects in my first year where I often sticked to a sequence of event and not tried new every time I am building a project.
So this summer I became more fascinated with system design and architecture where I just enjoyed learning about multiple concepts because I knew since the AI era has come it has made to write code very simple and easy but often times when we see the code written by AI lacks a lot of software development principles which is only possible when we transpose our idea to the AI and build system which scales to a lot of people, a project which has lot of efficiency be it when you are pushing a new update often times refactor comes and it would demolish most part of the system which was working due to lack of use of proper system design fundamentals.Then I started to build projects and learn about this which helped me to get a real simulation of the implementation.
During the course of this Summer Arc, I did many things which is as follows:
ICAS Transfer:
Tdlr to give a bit of background about my program at ICAS which is basically we study two years in abroad and later for remaining course transfer the course and credits to an abroad university.
My time at ICAS Manipal was one of the best times looking back as I learnt a lot of things living in a engineering campus managing many things independently. The hours of grind in comp sci is here where it started where I used to spend nights and days at my hostel room doing N number of things.
When it came to transfer I knew from the start that I need to look into a country where I don't have to think much about getting a job or settling rather where I could experiment and study freely and enjoy comp sci. Finally I got a 2 years tranfer in London, United Kingdom where I have just 1 year of course remaining and I'll be done with my undergrad.
This was a sweet spot as I got a scholarship as well as get to live in London where maximum number of tech events and networking happens which suits my exact track.
CTF:
I was always a hackathon person since the start, was never into the ctf section but in my 4th sem I had taken elective of Cyber Security over AI and ML where I studied Cryptography and System and Network Security. I feel the decision which I took was justified as it kind of showed a huge loop hole which existed in the market, since I was doing a lot of AI I always noticed that one things which makes people take a back seat after building good project is the cybersecurity section where AI’s are not able to reproduce that at this stage.
It kind of opened a section where it gave a sweet combination which I was expecting which is basically AI and security as AI doesn't give that much adrenaline rush as compared cyber security. Then I found a classmate who did lot of CTF and decided to form a team between our classmates and started taking part in CTF. Initially, it took time to adjust to get used to the categories of CTF but later on since my niche was AI, so I started learning with the help of AI and it gave a adrenaline rush which no hackathon gave so it was pretty good participating in CTF. Later on it just became a habit to take part in CTFs every now and then and as of present my team ranks 38th place in India among CTF teams.
Here’s a list of CTF which my team finished podium:
RiffHack - 2nd Position
TraceBash - 1st Position
BushBash, ANU Australia - 2nd Position
Snipers- 1st Position
CompFest- 1st Position
Also won a bunch of Prize pool which were
6 Months of Claude Pro Subscription by BushBash
12 Months of Try Hack Me Premium Subscription
2 Domains of .xyz for 1 Year
kWAPTA [Knight Squad Academy], PTF course [CyberWareLab]
Hackathons:
Hacks is one way where its the most efficient way for me to update my self to the new frameworks, tools, open source and AI. As it kind of pushes you under the bus to get the work done in a small crunch of time so for past 3 years or so hacks is one of the best place to test under the pressure how I think and come up with a solution. Every hack which I used to do I never used to thing about winning as at the end of the day I knew it all comes down to biggest takeaway which is what I learnt during this hack as it kind of build a muscle memory for upcoming projects.
Problem solving aspect origin comes from doing hacks is what I believe best so this summer I did something new which I didnt do earlier which is basically earlier I was doing a lot of domestic hackathons but never international hackathons. Participating in international hackathons was a mind blowing experience I believe as I often compared people around me in terms of tech skills and felt okay but international hacks gave a perspective of how the tech grind is on another level be it in US or China. So I started to build profile for my hack applications where I built my portfolio website, took a lot of reference letter from all places I contributed during my ICAS journey and documented clearly showing the progression of events.
Then came the ultimate hack which is HackMIT by Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA.
When I saw this hack I was like its impossible for me to get in this hack and thought ivy league people will leave no slots remaining to make a slot for me in this hack. Still I gave it a go in in early April where I just applied and took part in the qualifying round. Surprisingly I got into this hack, that was a unbelievable moment as I studied in MIT campus( Manipal Institute of Technology) so technically I was going from MIT in India to actual MIT in the USA. The more toughest part than the getting into HackMIT was the US visa, as everywhere I heard people saying its very difficult to get a visa for US as wait time is about 8 months for appointment and rejection also. So I took the leap of MIT tag and just applied to visa and by God’s grace I got a emergency appointment accepted by which I could get the appointment easily.
The day of the interview I was kind of nervous but also confident as till now I would have give may be like 40-50 interviews as I remember in Manipal I used to just sign up for a club recruitment every day and used to give 1 or 2 interview to push my self to overcome and master giving interview even for the topics which I have never read of. So that kind of helped but mid of the interview I knew I was going to be rejected but God’s grace the visa officer saw a letter from MIT USA expressing my invite to this event and my dad’s company which literally saved and got me US visa approved for 10 years. Since I am in my final year I thought why not give HackMIT a shot as its a insane opportunity which got my visa approved.
Also here’s a list of hackathons I got selected:
MIT Boston - Selected
LAHacks UCLA - Selected
HackGT Georgia Tech- Selected
SinceAI Finland- Selected
Junction Finland- Selected
UCF University of Central Florida - Selected
Big Red Hacks Cornell - Selected
HackGB University of Wisconsin–Madison- Selected
HackPSU Pennsylvania State University- Selected
Internship
Ofcourse in this summer I had to intern other wise it would be unfruitful summer for a developer.
I interned at Ericsson Global which is a Swedish MnC company which deals with telecommunications. I took a lot of courses there and learnt about cloud infrastructure which was a good experience.
Then I interned with a early stage startup which was building a voice agent where I worked as a backend developer setting up multiple automated pipelines where I learnt about how integration of features happen from a PR raise to being deployed in startup environment.
Projects:
I also worked on multiple projects during this summer which are listed below:
Projects
Distributed- https://github.com/jeevithg090/Distributed_System-Geo-Sharding
Computer Vision- https://github.com/jeevithg090/ComputerVision-Orchestra
Alert Forge- https://github.com/jeevithg090/AlertForge
Uniphish- https://github.com/jeevithg090/UniPhish
Prompt AI - https://github.com/jeevithg090/PromptAI
OpusAI- https://github.com/jeevithg090/Opus-App
IntentGuard- https://github.com/jeevithg090/IntentGuard
Attendance AI- https://github.com/jeevithg090/Attendance-AI