Recognition on Aldrin Jenson

That time my college put me on its homepage

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:00:00 -0400

In May 2026 I was approved for an O-1 visa. It’s the US visa for people with “extraordinary ability”, which is a very grand name for something that mostly involved me collecting documents for months.

The fun part came a few weeks later. Someone from my college, Model Engineering College in Kochi, asked if they could share the news, and the poster they made ended up as the very first thing on the college website, Statue of Liberty, American flag and all.

mec.ac.in, July 9, 2026. Slide 1 of 18.

After that, teachers and students I had never met started sending me congratulations, and the alumni cell even did an Alumni Spotlight on LinkedIn. It was really kind, and honestly a little hard to know how to respond. I’ve always been more comfortable keeping things quiet than taking credit. My mom said it was good that it was out there, because it might make some kid at MEC think they could do it too. I hope she’s right.

Big thanks to everyone at Athena, my lawyers, and the people who took the time to write letters for me.

And in case anyone thinks I made this up, here’s an archived copy of the college homepage from that day.

My Honours degree, from Kerala's Education Minister

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 12:00:00 +0530

I was awarded the Bachelor’s in Technology with Honours in Machine Learning by Smt. R. Bindu, the honourable Minister of Higher Education of Kerala state.

This was given to around 50 people from the whole state who qualified that year.

Along the way, I also earned an Elite certificate in the Top 2% of IIT Madras’s Introduction to Machine Learning course on NPTEL (the Government of India’s national online learning programme). That was about 36 people out of 1,816 who took the exam in April 2023.

Model Engineering College Students at University Convocation with our Former Principal

Judging the Hack4Tomorrow hackathon

Sat, 24 Feb 2024 12:00:00 +0530

I was fortunate to be invited as a Judge for the Hack4Tomorrow hackathon at Excel 2023

This was a nice new experience.

From participating in hackathons to organizing them to now finally Judging one!

With Rindish Krishna, Afnan, Vishruth, and Abid Omar - my fellow judges. Cool people

It was a good hackathon. Nice projects

After discussing among the judges, we finalized a few projects for the prize money. But I felt a bit sad thinking of the other teams who didn’t win. I don’t think I’d want to go into judging again if possible. The judges may have valid reasons to select certain projects, but it’s hard for other participants to directly understand them I feel. Especially since they spent so much effort in the past 24-48 hours on their work in the hopes to win the prize.

Since I’ve been on both sides, I think I’d personally rather not judge again.