From a 7.04 CGPA to a 60 LPA Microsoft Offer: The Story Of Tanish Patel, Student of Parul University

Tanish Patel is a final-year B.Tech Computer Science and Engineering student at Parul University, Vadodara, from Baroda himself, who chose the campus for its proximity and its infrastructure. He is one of only two students from his university selected for a Software Engineer Internship at Microsoft, which offers a complete package worth 60 LPA upon successful completion together with a monthly stipend of Rs 1,25,000 during the internship.

The achievement is remarkable. But the story behind it, of what it took to get from a student who was not particularly drawn to textbooks to one of two selected from a pool of over 200, is what makes it worth telling in detail. Head here to watch the raw emotions of Placement Day at Parul University!

The first question in the interview was the most direct: how does a 7.04 CGPA and a Microsoft internship coexist? Tanish answered without hesitation: I am not much interested in academic studies. Those are mostly just theories to me, and I do not really like theory. I like to work on things that can be seen, things that someone can use. What got me into Microsoft was DSA and projects, things I genuinely found interesting.

The distinction matters. The CGPA reflects attendance and examination performance. The Microsoft offer reflects what happened when the same student encountered something he actually wanted to get good at. Tanish had spent months building the specific skills that the hiring process tested, through the 40-day impact training offered by the Training and Placement Cell and his own sustained effort. When the moment came, those skills showed. Plenty of students with exceptional CGPAs do not clear the kind of rounds that Tanish cleared. And plenty who are brilliant at theory freeze when asked to think on their feet.

Tanish is open about the fact that coding did not always feel like a calling. For the first few semesters, it was something he was aware of but not actively pursuing. The shift came between his fourth and fifth semesters, when he enrolled in a specialised training programme offered to a selected group of B.Tech CSE students.

He describes the transformation precisely: At the start, I was not really much interested. When I started the impact interview training between my 4th and 5th semesters, I started loving it after studying for ten to fifteen days. The instructors and the friends were amazing, and everybody was invested in it. So it felt interesting, and after I was interested in it, I was good at it.

The trigger was not a sudden revelation. It was a gradual warmth generated by the right environment: good instructors, motivated peers, and a structure that gave him a reason to show up every day. The first week was when he understood what Data Structures and Algorithms meant in practice, not as a subject to memorise but as a way of thinking that underpins the software that runs the world. That understanding was the turning point.

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The impact training that preceded the placement season stretched over forty consecutive days. Every B.Tech CSE student at Parul University is offered this training between the 4th and 5th semesters. Tanish describes it as the hardest period of his academic life:

• 200 students started the training programme
• Tanish maintained the top position on the leaderboard from early on
• The group reduced to 50 after the first round
• Online assessment narrowed 50 to 11 students who received interview invitations
• From those 11, two received offers. Tanish was one of them.

The most significant aspect was the consistency. Doing one thing, uninterrupted, for 40 consecutive days allowed him to reach a level of concentration he had never achieved before. Nobody knew which company they were preparing for. The company name was not disclosed during training. The focus was entirely on building capability, not targeting a specific recruiter. That blindness turned out to be a strength: when the company turned out to be Microsoft, the students who had built genuine skills were ready regardless.

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When Tanish talks about his projects, he does not describe portfolio items. He describes problems he noticed and decided to solve. His central project was a quiz application built because he saw a specific gap: a company called Elogi had run a verbal reasoning quiz (50 questions in 30 minutes) during a placement drive, and there was no platform where students could practise under those exact conditions.

He said: I saw a problem which I could have potentially solved. So I started making my project based on this, to solve this problem of getting a time-based quiz setup for verbal and logical reasoning.

Building the application took him deep into technical areas he had not previously encountered:

• Database architecture: designing how quiz data, user progress, and results are stored
• Secure web design: protecting user data and preventing cheating mechanisms
• HTTP protocols: understanding how the browser communicates with the server
• Backend connectivity: building the server logic that powers the application

He learned these not from a curriculum but from necessity, because the project demanded it, and because he wanted it to work properly. The project demonstrates a developer’s thinking process: not what frameworks a developer knows, but what problems a developer notices, what questions a developer asks first, and how a developer works through actual constraints. In both of Tanish’s Microsoft interview rounds, this project was the foundation of the conversation. It did its job because it was genuine.

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Tanish had given exactly one mock interview before the Microsoft selection process, conducted by the Training and Placement Cell. He was nervous: It is my first time giving an interview. I was shaking when I first started, but then I got confident as it went on. Head here to read how 40 Days of Impact Training Led to Microsoft Placement!

• Opened with introduction, moved into project discussion
• DSA problem in non-literal form (different from standard practice, but solvable with the right approach)
• Tanish explained multiple approaches to the problem
• Interviewer satisfied. The round ended well.

• Built almost entirely around Tanish’s quiz app project
• Covered: the problem he identified, the system architecture he chose, the technical decisions he made, the learning experience
• Tanish describes enjoying this conversation

He said: Nine out of ten people, people who were better than us in both DSA and technical skills, were rejected. For those nine to be rejected and for the two of us not to be, it was very stressful. Those six days were very stressful before I got the offer letter.

What separated the two selected students was not being the best at any single thing. There were candidates with stronger DSA scores. There were candidates who communicated more fluently. What the two selected students had was balance: a combination of technical competence and communication ability that, taken together, satisfied what the interviewers were looking for. This is exactly the composite skill set that Mr. Gurcharan Singh, Director of Training and Placement, describes as the cell’s goal: making students into the kind of people that companies genuinely want.

When the call came confirming his selection, Tanish’s reaction was, in his own words, very fulfilling: From all the hard days of learning DSA, those late nights, the very difficult problems to solve, the project, everything came together at that moment. His parents, who had watched him work through those months, were happy but not shocked. They had seen the effort. They had believed in the outcome before he had.

Tanish chose Parul University for practical reasons: proximity to home, strong infrastructure, a comfortable campus. But what the university gave him went beyond the practical:

• The 40-day impact training was the direct enabling condition. He said: I tried to do DSA by myself previously but I was not consistent. Nobody was handing me a plan. The training helped me do this.
• Instructors Siddharth Sir and Nandita Ma’am made the material feel worth learning
• The ecosystem of motivated peers created conditions for productive work: If all your friends have the same goal, of getting placed at the same level, you would grow together. Whatever you are doing.
• The university taught him professional conduct: honesty, responsibility, and how to handle things professionally
• The mock interview before the real one ensured he was not walking in completely unprepared