Why I switched from B.Tech to MBA, and what I didn't expect.

Everyone in Gujarat already knows your story before you've lived it.

You're from a business family, so obviously you'll take over the business. That's not a prediction, it's a social contract. And for a long time, I quietly resisted it. Not because I didn't respect what my family built, but because I wanted to find out what I could build.

So I chose engineering. B.Tech in Information Technology from GTU. Four years of systems, logic, and code. It felt like the furthest I could get from "he'll manage the shop" without leaving the country.

The turn nobody saw coming

During my third year, our college organised its annual tech fest, Prakarsh. I ended up leading the marketing campaigns for it. Outreach across colleges, driving registrations, building noise for something that existed only on paper a few months before.

I expected to find it mechanical. It turned out to be the most alive I'd felt in college.

Understanding audiences. Figuring out what makes people show up. Watching numbers move because of something you decided to say differently — that did something to me. I wasn't coding the fest into existence. I was convincing people it was worth their time. That distinction mattered more than I expected.

The year between

My final year looked different from most of my batch. While others were prepping for placements, I was preparing for CAT and interning at an IT consultancy simultaneously.

The internship was mostly B2B: lead generation, email outreach, and CRM work. Our clients were businesses trying to automate their operations with ERP systems and Power BI dashboards. I was the person finding them, calling them, and figuring out what they actually needed versus what they said they needed.

It was unglamorous work. It was also the first time I understood what a sales funnel feels like from the inside, not as a diagram in a textbook, but as a real thing that stalls, leaks, and occasionally converts.

I cleared the CAT. I came to Delhi.

What I didn't expect

I expected PGDM to sharpen what I already knew. It has. But it's also shown me how much I was pattern-matching without knowing it.

Growing up around a real family business in Patan means you absorb things without realising — how pricing decisions get made without spreadsheets, how customer trust compounds over decades, how distribution in a Tier-3 market doesn't look like anything a case study describes. That background doesn't come with credentials. It just sits there, quietly informing how I see things.

PGDM gave that intuition a vocabulary. Operations, strategy, consumer behaviour — suddenly the things I'd observed had names, frameworks, explanations. Sometimes the frameworks fit. Sometimes they don't, and that gap is more interesting than the fit.

There's also Google. I'm now a Campus Ambassador for Gemini AI — promoting their tools for students, running sessions, and staying inside the AI ecosystem professionally. Alongside my PGDM, I'm building automation pipelines, experimenting with AI agents, and figuring out how the technology actually behaves when you push it.

The B.Tech wasn't a detour. It turns out to be the whole point. The systems thinking, the comfort with tools, the ability to build — it's what makes the marketing perspective different.

The honest version

I didn't switch because I had a plan. I switched because I followed the one thing in college that made me feel like I was actually doing something, not just completing something.

If you're reading this as someone mid-B.Tech and wondering whether to pivot, I won't tell you that marketing or an MBA is the answer. I'll tell you that the question worth asking is simpler: what have you done that made time disappear? Start there.

The rest follows. Slower than you'd like, but it follows.