From a Biology Classroom Where He Did Not Belong to HashedIn by Deloitte as SDE-1: How Parth Bangoria Switched Streams, Entered B.Tech CSE Through Diploma Lateral Entry at Parul University, Cracked GATE at AIR 9,000 From 177,000 Candidates, and Made an Interviewer Stop Asking Questions Mid-Round

Not every software engineer’s story starts in a computer lab. Some start in a biology classroom, a classroom the student never belonged in, staring at textbooks that never spoke back.

Parth Bangoria grew up in Gujarat. Around 80 percent in Class 10 SSC boards. After 10th, he enrolled in the science stream with biology, the path toward medicine, without fully examining whether it was actually his path. He did not perform poorly out of laziness. He performed poorly out of misalignment. The subjects did not hold him. The goal did not motivate him. He knew it, even when it was uncomfortable to say out loud.

“I was not quite liking it much, but I was not aware of everything at that point of time in my life. I was too young. But once I got to know that it is not the field that I should be in, I told my parents. It was a bit of a tough time. They were like, you should complete whatever you have started.”

His parents were not unsupportive. They were cautious, the caution of people who had watched his elder sister earn a PhD in agriculture and who understood that choosing a field is not a small decision. Eventually, they listened. Eventually, they let go. When Parth told them clearly that medicine was not going to be his path, they told him to follow what felt right.

What felt right was computers. It had always, at some level, felt right. The interest had been there since school, but it crystallised during his diploma. He had not taken mathematics in Class 11 and 12, the biology stream had blocked that bridge, and so the direct path to B.Tech was not open to him. Diploma became the route in. It was, in retrospect, the right route.

This is a situation thousands of students in India face silently: they chose the wrong stream after 10th, realised it too late, and now the conventional pathway is closed. Parth did not sit with that. He found the unconventional pathway. Diploma first and then straight entry into B.Tech CSE of Parul University. The route was longer. You too can find your route by not wasting time and by being ambitious about your own passion. If you’re driven by software development and AI excites you, then enrol into B.tech AI & ML of Parul University – delay not and do it right away!

When it came time to move toward a B.Tech CSE, Parth made a decision that reflects a mindset he would carry throughout his time at Parul: he chose the place with the most competition and the most opportunity, not the most comfort.

“The problem with all the colleges and campuses is they don’t have a large scale of support and opportunities. But here in Parul University, they have a large number of students and a large number of opportunities because they attract more talent. I felt like if I can compete with more students and more opportunities, I will always end up in a better place.”

That instinct, to seek the harder room, is the same instinct that would later lead him to attempt GATE when nobody around him was doing it, to sit through a three-round HashedIn by Deloitte’s interview, and to turn down a safer internship for something with a higher ceiling. The pattern repeats across every decision he made at Parul.

Parth arrived at Parul in his first year with ambition and no immediate channel for it. He and a friend discovered PIERC, Parul University’s startup incubation centre has succesfully incubated 254 startups and championed Rs 20 crore+ funding.
Besides this, their startups have received funding from Shark-tank India as well.

Together they began building Axamine.ai, a startup in the medical space. It was Parth’s first real exposure to what it means to build something from scratch: handling feedback, watching an idea evolve under scrutiny, learning what it means to create rather than simply study.

He stepped back from Axamine.ai eventually. His friend continued building it while Parth turned toward a different kind of preparation. But the early experience of trying to create something left a mark on how he understood problem-solving. It was not theoretical anymore.

The other thread was an attempt to start a coding club. The student base needed to sustain it had thinned out, but the effort connected him to people on campus who cared about the same things. One faculty member stood out:

“There was a faculty named Khyati ma’am, in the CSE department. She helped us a lot during that time. She was supporting us to start a coding club. She helped us see new opportunities.”

In a campus ecosystem where students frequently cite the quality of human intervention, a mentor who noticed and a coordinator who pushed, Khyati ma’am’s presence represents something that does not show up in a curriculum but shapes outcomes. The coding club did not survive. The connection to a faculty member who believed in the effort did. Have many ideas to code? Say yes to your coding dreams with 100% confidence by enroling into Parul University’s MCA in Artificial Intelligence.

In his early years at Parul, Parth began looking seriously at GATE, the Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering. His motivation was not a master’s degree. It was something more strategic and arguably more unusual: he wanted his computer science fundamentals to be so strong that no interviewer could find a gap.

“I felt like if I go for GATE and if I learn everything, the basics and fundamentals of computer science will be very clear.”

He prepared largely on his own. There was no dedicated GATE preparation facility at the university at the time. He qualified with an All India Rank of approximately 9,000 in GATE 2025, which placed him in roughly the top 5 percent of nearly 177,000 candidates who appeared in the computer science paper.

What he gained was not a rank on a certificate. What he gained was a foundation so solid that it would later unsettle interviewers who were expecting to find gaps. But there was a trade-off he made knowingly: GATE preparation consumed the time he would have spent on daily coding practice. His fundamentals became exceptional. His coding consistency slipped. He names this without hesitation as the one thing he would change.

“My computer fundamentals were so clear that people were not easily able to beat me in computer science fundamentals. It helped me a lot. But you have to give pretty much time into GATE computer science. So you might be lacking a bit in coding.”

When Parth walked into his first technical interview round with HashedIn by Deloitte, the conversation moved through DSA questions at a reasonable pace. Then the interviewer paused. He looked at the resume more carefully. He saw the GATE entry.

GATE on a software engineering resume is sometimes read as a signal that the candidate is preparing to leave for a master’s programme rather than committing to the company. Parth knew the risk. He defended it directly: he was gaining technical skills, not planning to leave.

“He was so impressed. He stopped asking me questions and said: I know whatever question I will ask, you will know the answer because you have given GATE. And at the end he took five minutes and appreciated me. He said whatever the rank is, you have prepared well for it and it has helped your fundamentals a lot.”

The interviewer closed the technical round early. Not because Parth had given perfect answers to every question, but because the quality of his foundation made further probing unnecessary. This is what GATE preparation did that no amount of LeetCode alone could have: it built a depth of understanding that an experienced interviewer could recognise within minutes.

The HashedIn by Deloitte selection at Parul followed a demanding structure. It began with an online assessment: three DSA questions, two medium and one hard, to be solved under time pressure. Parth cleared them with five minutes to spare. He had made a decision going in: he would solve all three, however long it took.

Three interview rounds followed. The first technical round ended early after the GATE conversation. The second focused on system design, database architecture, and the foundational logic of how software systems are structured and scaled. This was the harder round. Parth was strong on fundamentals but thinner on the structural design side.

“In the system design round, I was lacking in the database designs and structural designs at that moment. But the people in the interview felt like giving me an opportunity.”

He is not framing this as false modesty. He is naming a gap that existed and acknowledging that the interviewers saw enough potential in everything else to extend the opportunity despite it. The third round was HR. Each of the two technical rounds ran for approximately one and a half hours. Three rounds means more than three hours of evaluation compressed into a single high-pressure day.

Between the clarity that GATE gave him and the placement that HashedIn offered him, there was a bridge. That bridge was the IMPACT training programme, run by Parul University’s Training and Placement Cell. IMPACT brought external trainers onto campus to prepare students specifically for placement season: DSA, system thinking, interview readiness, and the kind of coding consistency that GATE does not demand in the same way.

“The trainers that used to come from outside the college were pretty much skilled. They used to teach us DSA and everything. That summer kind of training that the university provides, yes, that helped me a lot.”

Parth is candid about what IMPACT did for him: it re-engaged his coding habit at precisely the moment it mattered. He had allowed it to lapse during GATE preparation. The training pulled it back.

“I tried to do DSA and coding properly in that training. I was a bit serious. I had to code right now. If not, I would be missing the opportunities that will come after this.”

Before HashedIn, there was another offer. Parth had completed an internship with MRI Software and received signals of a path forward. It was not a bad option. It was simply not the ceiling he was looking for.

“I was also selected at MRI Software. I was working there as an intern. But I felt like the college and everyone supported me to go for a higher opportunity because both companies had opportunities, but they told me to scale up a bit.”

The decision to hold out for HashedIn by Deloitte, to not take the safer offer and instead compete for something harder, is characteristic of every major decision Parth has made. He chose Parul for its competitive scale. He chose GATE to build a foundation most students skip. He chose the three-round interview instead of settling early. The pattern is consistent. It is not recklessness. It is a deliberate preference for the harder room.

The offer was not the end. It was the beginning of something more demanding. HashedIn by Deloitte structures its internship as what it calls HashedIn University: a training and evaluation period of roughly two months that does not ease new joiners into the role. It throws them in.

“They call it HashedIn University. It is like two months of performance training. It is quite a tough thing to handle for anyone. There were folks who were from IITs and everywhere. But it is not based on where you are from. They just see your coding skills. They give tasks like anything. You will not be able to complete it without sleepless nights.”

The people in that room came from the top engineering institutions in the country. They had brand names behind their degrees. None of that mattered. What mattered was output: consistency, quality, and whether you could hold up under sustained pressure. Parth held up. At the end of HashedIn University, based entirely on his performance, he was extended a full-time offer as Software Development Engineer 1 at 8 LPA.

“Once you clear that university, it is good life for you. But the people over there want to test your skills, whether this person fits for our company or not. Even if you complete the interview process, they will scale you as tough as anyone else in the room.”

A biology dropout. A diploma lateral entry student. Sitting in the same evaluation room as IIT graduates. Judged on the same tasks. Given the same sleepless nights. And clearing the same bar. Pedigree is not performance.

“I have one thing to say: I should not have quit coding consistency. If I consistently coded throughout the four years of my B.Tech, I would be in a far better place. But I believe that I will consistently code from right now, and I will end up in a better place after two to five years.”

The self-awareness in that statement, the honest accounting of where he left something on the table paired with the refusal to treat it as a closed matter, is the same quality that made an interviewer stop asking questions mid-round. He is not presenting a flawless journey. He is presenting a real one, with a gap he has already named and a plan to close it. Watch the raw and real emotions of Placement Day 2026 at the ever-flourishing campus of Parul University!

“Don’t break yourself. You will be there somewhere. There is some place for you. So you have to be patient and you will find it.”

Parth came to Parul as a diploma lateral entry student from Gujarat, an average student by his own account, with a detour through biology behind him and a conviction about computers ahead. He maintained a 7.5 CGPA throughout his B.Tech. He is leaving as a GATE-qualified engineer placed at one of the most selective software
consultancies in India, with a full-time offer earned through performance rather than pedigree.

The enablers are traceable. PIERC gave him the Axamine.ai startup experience that shaped how he thinks about problem-solving. Khyati ma’am supported the coding club when it needed a faculty champion. IMPACT training closed the coding gap that GATE had opened, delivering DSA consistency at the exact moment placement season began.

The competitive scale of Parul, the sheer number of students and the breadth of the placement network, was what Parth came looking for. He wanted to be tested by the volume. And the Training & Placement Cell supported his decision to decline MRI Software and hold out for HashedIn, reinforcing the pattern of choosing the harder room. Head here to learn how 40 days of IMPACT training plays a major role in these placements.

B.Tech CSE at Parul University’s Faculty of Engineering and Technology. The same programme that produced Tanish Patel (60 LPA, Microsoft), Soumya Dhakad (43 LPA, US-based MNC), and the 4 LinkedIn CoachIn women (top 100 from 21,000). NAAC A++ (CGPA 3.55). 250+ technology labs. 2,200+ recruiters. Besides this, Parul University is awarded by ASSOCHAM as a Best University in Placements for 3 consecutive years.

Head here to read how India’s Fav MS Dhoni felicitated #ProudlyPlaced Students of PU!