Parul University’s First Female Army Officer: The Story of Shiva Trivedi!

When Shiva Trivedi’s joining letter arrives, and she reports to the Officers Training Academy, she will become the first female student from Parul University to be commissioned into the Indian Army and only the second female PU student to become an officer across the Armed Forces, after Kunjal Gosai reached the Indian Navy earlier this year. Her story begins not with military lineage but with a school assembly in Jamnagar, and it is defined by a temperament she shares with that earlier first: a refusal to let an unclear path stay unclear and a willingness to keep returning to the SSB gate until the result matches the effort.

Shiva was born and raised in Jamnagar, Gujarat, in a family with no defence background at all. She is candid that she had no inherited exposure to military life, no vocabulary for it, and nothing to model herself on. Her father passed away in 2017, leaving her mother, a government lawyer, to raise two daughters alone. Against that backdrop, Shiva would become, in her words, the first in her bloodline to wear the uniform, a motivation that had to be discovered rather than inherited.

She traces the beginning to Class 9, when, as head girl of JP Modi CBSE School, she was asked to host a senior Navy officer visiting as chief guest. After his seminar, the officer set the students a small test: make a meaningful sentence from a difficult, negative word. Shiva was the only one who turned it into something positive. The officer, struck by the response, encouraged her, and though it was a brief encounter, it planted something that did not go away. She was head girl for four consecutive years, Classes 9 to 12, and describes herself academically as above average rather than a top performer.

Yoga is my achievement. I have played it for so long and kept winning, and that has given me huge confidence.
– Shiva Trivedi

What Shiva counts as her genuine standout lies outside the classroom: competitive yoga. She has represented Gujarat at Khel Mahakumbh, the state’s annual sporting competition, winning gold for twelve consecutive years, and in 2024, represented Parul University at the All India University Yoga Championship in Kurukshetra. That long discipline of training, competing, and winning built the composure and physical readiness that the SSB would later test, and it is a reminder that the qualities defence selection looks for are often built years earlier, in an unrelated arena.

After Class 12, Shiva knew only that computer science was not for her and was drawn instead to aeronautics: the mechanics of flight, Bernoulli’s principle, and the scale of engineering. Only three colleges in Gujarat offered aeronautical engineering at the time, and Parul University, closest to home, felt the safest choice, quietly satisfying her mother’s wish that she not study far away. At Parul University, she enrolled in the National Cadet Corps, which she credits as the true turning point: it surrounded her with like-minded aspirants and introduced her to a vocabulary—NDA, CDS, AFCAT—she had never encountered in conventional academic circles. The value of that exposure is set out in the guide to NCC benefits

Defence was her real goal, and the Air Force her first choice. Through the Air Force wing of the NCC, she even flew guided sorties. But she missed the window to apply for the Air Force SSB through the NCC Special Entry, and the next opportunity was a year away, longer than she was willing to wait. She pursued an alternative instead, a technical entry open to engineering graduates, which carried its own SSB. Her aeronautical degree placed her in the mechanical branch, where she comfortably cleared the cut-off. The SSB she was allotted was an Army entry, and within the Army one field drew her immediately: the Army Aviation Corps, which trains officers as combat helicopter pilots. Having studied the path of Major Abhilasha Barak, the first woman combat aviator, she found that even in the Army, she was choosing something that gave her flight. The full range of Army officer entry routes  shows exactly where her path fits.

The most difficult part of Shiva’s journey, she says, was not the SSB or the physical tasks. It was telling her mother. Winning that support took time and help: friends with defence-adjacent backgrounds walked her mother through the reality of the profession, that deployment to a battlefield is not the default, and that officers serve in a wide range of roles. Shiva took her mother to INS Valsura and the Air Force base in Jamnagar to see service life up close and showed her a well-known video profiling women officers. Her mother’s answer captures the whole arc: A promising career, she said, but please do not die. Start with the right engineering degree, explore B.Tech in Aeronautical Engineering at Parul University, and take your first step towards a future in aviation, technology, and the armed forces!

Shiva’s first SSB ended in Conference Out, a rejection at the final stage, and she is clear that it taught her the real cost of being physically underprepared rather than defeating her. It is here that her mother’s transformation became visible. Having once prayed, out of fear, that her daughter would not be selected, she instead became, before the second attempt, her steadiest support.

She said, “Do whatever you want; I am there for you. You want to fall, you want to run; I am there to catch you.”
– Shiva Trivedi, on her mother

The second attempt ended in recommendation. For anyone facing the same setback, the lessons of returning to the board after a rejection are drawn out in how to handle an SSB rejection and clear it and in the process itself in how to clear the SSB interview.

Don’t keep your heart in it. If it happens, it’s good. If it doesn’t, it’s even better. That advice will stay with me forever.
– Shiva Trivedi

The single piece of advice Shiva holds onto came from a coach: never get too attached to any one outcome. Defence selection, she notes, is unpredictable at every stage—screening, conference, medicals, merit—and attaching your heart to it only sets up heartbreak. She has since applied that principle well beyond the SSB to jobs, relationships, and careers. She pairs it with a second, practical rule she insists on: never keep defence as your only option. True to it, she secured an off-campus placement at Hitech Digital Solutions as a backup before fully committing to her SSB journey, ensuring that giving her all did not mean risking everything.

One thing Shiva raises without any self-consciousness is her use of Parul University’s counselling service during a personally difficult period, and she actively encourages other students to do the same. Speaking to a professional who will listen without judgment, she says, is a strength rather than something to be ashamed of, and she praises Parul University for providing genuine counsellors that students can turn to. It is a message worth amplifying: seeking support is part of resilience, not a departure from it.

Asked whether the title of Parul’s first female Army officer weighs on her, Shiva’s answer is unburdened. She points to her seniors and batchmates already in the academy and declines to frame her achievement as a responsibility. She calls it, simply, a good thing she did, held with the same calm her coach taught her: Happy but not attached. As her elder sister prepares to marry in December, the same season Shiva navigates her medicals and joining logistics, both daughters are, in their own ways, leaving home at once, one for a wedding and one for the Army, in a household that has learned to hold both.