Taken a break from your career and want to get back in the saddle? Or want to acquire new skills without committing to a formal degree? Then, IIIT Hyderabad has an interesting programme just for you. Through the Post Graduate Student Status Programme (PGSSP), students can opt for IIIT-H’s advanced courses — full-time or part-time. And its latest product is Priya Radhakrishnan. After working as a software engineer for ten years at Alcatel-Lucent, Radhakrishnan decided to quit her job to embrace motherhood. But she did not want to lose touch with the industry in the bargain. “I got married right after I finished my B Tech, so I always felt that I needed to complete my studies at some point,” says Radhakrishnan, who has now relocated to Bengaluru.

Radhakrishnan finished her thesis under the guidance of Dr Vasudeva Varma and Dr Manish Gupta at the Information Retrieval and Extraction Lab. Dr Partha Pratim Talukdar was her mentor when she was visiting the MALL lab at IISc

Radhakrishnan signed up for the PGSS programme in 2010, in 2012 she opted for MS in Research Programme, a two-year course, and in 2014, at the end of the course, it was converted into a PhD because she was keen on taking up research in this area. She successfully defended her thesis on ‘Named Entity Extraction for Knowledge Base Enhancement’. And this June, she will start working as a research scientist at an MNC. I mean, talk about fulfilment!

All full-time courses require a student's presence on campus and they are also required to stay in the institute's hostels. However, in Radhakrishnan’s case, an exception was made

“It is always a good thing to attend college, train in the latest technologies and come back to the industry,” says Radhakrishnan, who is a mother of two. So, if you are someone who wants to get back into the classroom and invoke your inner Priya Radhakrishnan, sign up for this course.

To find out more, click on iiit.ac.in/