Parul University Maverick 2.0: How Sanjana Hemnani Went From a Gujarati-Medium Classroom to a Half-Hour English Jury Interview

From the outside, Sanjana Hemnani’s achievement looks like talent: a Maverick tag earned at Parul University, a confident half-hour jury interview in fluent English. But her real story is about distance travelled. A girl from a small town in Gujarat, educated entirely in Gujarati medium, she once froze thirty seconds into a ten-line self-introduction. What she did next is the whole point.

I was not even able to give my introduction for one or two minutes, but today I can give an interview for almost half an hour, speaking in English. Everything goes to Parul University.
– Sanjana Hemnani

Sanjana is from Godhra, about two hours from Vadodara, a town so small, she notes, that it has just one college. Her entire schooling was in Gujarati. “I never got the chance to present myself like this or give interviews in English,” she says. “We used to study everything in Gujarati and speak Gujarati only.” It is a detail that reframes everything that follows: the poised, English-language jury interview that earned her the Maverick tag began from zero exposure to exactly that kind of communication. Through three schools and a Bachelor of Commerce (which she completed with a first-class distinction), one thing stayed constant, she was consistently among the top students in her class.

Ask Sanjana what shaped her before Parul, and she does not point to a classroom. Before her MBA, she ran an Instagram page that she grew to more than nine million in reach, anonymously. “It was my page, but I did not post my own content,” she explains. “I posted edits of a celebrity I admire and some reels where my face is not present, but I managed everything, from editing to posting.” It began, almost by accident, as a fan page for a performer she admired, and became a self-taught education in digital marketing. “From that day, I learned something new every day. That made the page grow, and me grow.” Paired with her academic record, it convinced her of two things: that she had potential, and that digital marketing was what she wanted to pursue.

Fittingly for a future marketer, Sanjana was drawn to Parul University partly by its own marketing. “As I’m from digital marketing, I admire their marketing strategy a lot,” she says. But the deeper pull was a test she set herself: could she leave her comfort zone, her friends, her familiar world, and survive somewhere new? “It was one of the best decisions of my life,” she says now. “What I am and what I am doing right now, it is a big thank you to Parul University for giving me the platform.”

The single moment Sanjana returns to is not a marketing lecture. In her Career Development Cell (CDC) class, where students present themselves daily, she was asked to introduce herself in ten lines, and went blank after thirty seconds. “That day I realised this is not how I wanted to be,” she says. Her response was simple and relentless: show up every day, prepared or not, passing or failing, and get on the stage as often as possible.

Every day I showed up. Whether I was prepared or not, whether I was failing or passing, I tried to be there. That made me improve a lot.
– Sanjana Hemnani

It is a striking contrast to the student who would later hold a jury’s attention for half an hour, and a lesson any nervous presenter can borrow. (For more, see our guide to overcoming stage fear and presenting with confidence.)

Sanjana’s summer internship was at PerPassenger Travels, a travel start-up, as a social-media-marketing intern, though the title undersold the work. Handling Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and WhatsApp channels, she designed content, built posting strategies for destinations from Ladakh to Thailand, and ran the analytics. In a small team, her role expanded fast: “I took the whole responsibility of editing, posting, script writing, video editing, and captioning. I guided colleagues, managed people, and had meetings with the CEO.” The results were concrete, the work generated more than forty leads and converted several into customers. Alongside it, she built genuine technical range through a sales-analytics project (learning Excel, Power BI, and SQL from scratch), and turned her internship into a research paper on how social media and customer engagement influence each other.

Also Read: What is Maverick Batch at Parul University?

Sanjana traces her Maverick journey to a third-semester placement orientation, after which, she says, she kept detailed notes on exactly what the tag required. What followed was a months-long sequence: pre-Impact training and a project, then the main Impact Training block (where she also took on a coordinator and class-representative role), building soft skills through interviews, debates, group discussions, and presentations, followed by aptitude tests, personal interviews, and finally Maverick Day before the jury.

Every hard work, late-night project, doing research and presenting myself, everything was worth it. Because I got the tag, and it means a lot.
– Sanjana Hemnani

The final interview, she says, felt like a conversation rather than an interrogation, helped by a warm, human moment at the start that put her at ease. The substantive questions drew directly on her internship: one panellist asked how she would plan and post content if she were made digital-marketing head of a major travel brand. She kept her own presentation short, a two-to-three-minute brief on her PerPassenger internship, and let the discussion carry the weight, exactly the kind of confident, knowledge-led exchange the Maverick process is designed to reward.

Sanjana was one of 22 students, from a batch she estimates at around 1,700, to earn the Maverick 2.0 tag. Asked what set her apart, she credits discipline over raw ability.

I am very particular and very serious about what I want to do. If there is a deadline, I complete it on that date. I am the first one to do it.
– Sanjana Hemnani

The feedback she received matched her own assessment, strong knowledge and passion for her field, with articulation as the area to keep sharpening. Hearing her name announced remains vivid: “There were so many people, but I had butterflies in my stomach. It was such a wonderful moment.”

Asked what she gained that she did not arrive with, Sanjana returns to the same theme: communication. “Apart from the specialisation in digital marketing, the major thing would be my communication skills and presenting myself well, that is the best thing I learned at Parul University.” With placement season ahead, her sights are set on digital-marketing roles at consumer-tech brands she admires for their content and social strategy, and she has already applied where such opportunities have opened, aiming for a role where she can keep growing.

Her advice draws straight from her lowest moment, the thirty seconds of silence, and what she did with it.

Just give it your all and be there. If you get the opportunity, don’t think twice, go. If you pass, wonderful. If you fail, you still learn a lot, we learn more from failures.
– Sanjana Hemnani

Try to be on the stage, she adds, speak, connect with seniors, and network, because the habit of showing up is what changes everything. She credits her growth directly to her faculty mentors, Dr. Shubhangi Rao and Dr. Anil Sharma.