Nishant Totla’s journey from a high-achieving student to a prominent academic figure is a remarkable story of talent and perseverance. Achieving second place in the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) in 2008, Totla stood out among over 375,000 candidates. His exceptional performance didn’t stop there; he also secured an impressive All India Rank of 43 in the All India Engineering Entrance Examination (AIEEE) 2008, which had over 800,000 participants.
Totla’s achievements were recognized with the Academy Excellence Award for 2008-09 by IIT Bombay, and he also earned the distinction of being a National Gold Medallist in the Chemistry Olympiad. His academic prowess continued at IIT Bombay, where he pursued a BTech in Computer Science with a minor in Mathematics.
His professional journey saw him contributing to notable tech companies. As a Software Engineering Intern at X (formerly Twitter), Totla was involved in developing the internal Scala framework for batch job processing and designing back-end systems for advertising metrics. His career further advanced at Google’s North America office, where he worked as a software engineer with a compensation package of approximately Rs 52 lakh per annum.
Raised in Aurangabad, Maharashtra, as the only child of a doctor couple, Totla’s early life was marked by strong encouragement from his parents, particularly in his passion for mathematics. This support was instrumental in his academic success, leading to a gold medal in the International Physics Olympiad and the prestigious JEE rank.
Currently, Nishant Totla is in the third year of his PhD program in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. His journey exemplifies how early support, coupled with passion and hard work, can lead to extraordinary achievements in academia and beyond.
