From JEE to Architecture: Pratham Vani’s Journey at Parul University

Not every architect knew they wanted to be one. Pratham Vani, a B.tech student of Parul University who is now a seventh-semester student of architecture. In school he prepared for engineering entrance exams, but his realisation of architecture made him land in the field he wanted to pursue.

His journey is worth telling because it is honest about the doubt, the switch, and the hard work that a creative degree actually involves, and it will be familiar to any student weighing the same choice.

Pratham who was born in Indore, MP, and had his schooling there, is a son of a life insurance officer. He was drawn to building, sketching, and creating from a very young age and always reconstructed his own toys.

The constant gut feeling stayed was an early sign to pursue the field of architecture. After tenth std, he kept his creative field aside and went on to prepare for the conventional path, that is JEE and other engineering entrances, like other students in India do.

He had heard about Parul University from people back home, particularly a cousin who had completed her MBA there, and a campus visit drew him in. The first application he gave was of B.Tech and not architecture. He was preparing for JEE Advanced, and as his father motivated him, he also gave the architecture entrance, NATA – National Aptitude Test in Architecture. Although he was adamant about engineering, it was his father who encouraged him towards something creative for years.

Pratham enquired about architecture, changed his application, and secured admission in the fourth round of NATA admissions that year.

The switch did not feel right immediately. His first fifteen days at the university left him uncertain of his path, the ordinary disorientation of a student who has just walked away from a plan years in the making. In two months’ time, he was fully into the creative space and activity on campus, motivated by working alongside faculty, including the professors. Prof. Pithawala supported him; he is a visiting faculty member. Uncertainty was still there, but it was overcome by his commitment and consistency. For a student weighing a similar leap, that is the honest reassurance: certainty is not a prerequisite; involvement is.

Competitions became his real classroom. Within a few years he had entered five, from college to national level.

• The Maheshwar Competition, 2025.
• The Step Well competition, 2024.
• The Amaravati design project.
• The Anand design project.
• The Drawingboard competition.

His work on the Anand project fed into a broader institutional proposal for the Anand Institute of Management, built around a striking funnel-shaped central form described as an event horizon grid, radiating into curved, courtyard-facing modules designed for passive cooling and cross-ventilation. Competition work, in his experience, is where a student stops designing for a grade and starts designing to be judged by strangers, which is a different and more useful discipline. Each competition also forced him into a new subject, from stepwells to institutional campuses, building the range that a single studio sequence rarely provides on its own.

Pratham is direct about how much of his growth he owes to teachers. He credits Mrugesh sir and Vidhi Pandya ma’am for his foundational classes, and Monika ma’am and Pithawala sir for guiding his competition work. For a project involving temple architecture, Yash J. sir agreed to mentor him, bringing not only a strong creative approach to temple design but also the influence of his own father, an archaeologist. That kind of mentorship, where a teacher’s own lineage of knowledge passes to a student, is a large part of what an architecture education actually transfers.

It is worth noticing what that list reveals. A single student names five different teachers for five different needs: foundations, competitions, and a specialist mentor for a temple brief. Good architectural training is not one instructor delivering a syllabus but a network of practitioners a student can draw on as each project demands, and a programme is only as strong as the range of that network.

One experience marked him more than any prize. During a fifth-semester jury review, he was scolded for not engaging attentively enough with his own design concepts. Rather than defend the work, he spent his entire two-week Diwali vacation redoing the whole submission from scratch and presenting it again.

He spent his two-week Diwali vacation redoing an entire jury submission from scratch, then presented it again.

That response is the lesson. The willingness to tear down and rebuild, rather than argue for work that fell short, is a trait every good architect needs, and it is learned young, usually the hard way. A jury that scolds is not a jury that has given up on a student; it is one that expects more, and the students who improve are those who hear it that way rather than as an insult. One of his own creations, a 3D-printed sky creeper in red and white inspired by his fascination with the New York skyline, sat among his seventh-semester work as evidence of where that persistence had taken him.

Pratham’s journey is useful precisely because it is ordinary in its uncertainty. Many talented students are pushed toward engineering by default, sit an architecture entrance almost as a hedge, and only later discover where their instincts actually lie. His path shows that the switch is possible, that early doubt is survivable, and that the deciding factor is not certainty at eighteen but willingness to work once the choice is made.

It also quietly answers a question anxious families ask: whether a creative degree is a serious one. The answer in his case is that it is more demanding than the engineering track he left, not less, measured in sleepless nights, hard critique, and the constant remaking of one’s own work.

Asked what students considering architecture should know, Pratham did not sell the field. He spoke candidly about staying up for three nights on a project only to be scolded regardless, and about how frustration creeps in and has to be met with patience and continued creativity. Patience, in his telling, is not optional in this discipline.

There is something disarming in that honesty. A student who has been through three sleepless nights and a scolding, and still recommends the field, is making a more persuasive case than any glossy prospectus could. He is not promising ease; he is promising that the difficulty is worth it for the right person, which is the only honest promise a discipline like this can make.

For the next five years, he intends to pursue a master’s degree and eventually open his own architecture firm. Asked for the essence of architecture, he answered simply that for him it is always the aesthetics. That clarity, held through sleepless nights and hard juries, is what the discipline asks for, and it echoes the honest picture of the profession that visiting architects painted at the same event, covered in a companion article on the reality of an architect’s career.

If there is a single takeaway for a student on the fence, it is that a decision made late can still be made well. Pratham did not arrive at architecture by a straight line or an early certainty. He arrived by trying it, doubting it, working through the doubt, and staying long enough to fall for the craft, which may be the most common way anyone finds the work they were meant to do.