Background

I was born and brought up in the city of Rajkot, Gujarat. My parents, Ektaa and Dipal Faldu, are the reason for everything I've been able to achieve — and I owe them more than I can put into words. Growing up, I shared my home with a family of ten: my grandparents, great-grandparents, uncle, aunt, my cousin, and my younger sister Pihu. A joint family that large sounds chaotic from the outside, but what it actually gave me was a classroom of people. Every person in that house saw the world differently, and I picked up something different from each of them — patience, persistence, how to listen, how to disagree without damaging a relationship, and how to keep going when things got hard. I didn't realise it at the time, but that house shaped how I work with people more than any course or club ever has.

I started school at S.N. Kansagara in Rajkot — an ordinary school where I chased perfect scores, made loads of friends, and mostly just enjoyed being a kid. But from 6th grade onwards, my parents started pushing me to consider a boarding school. The thought of being away from family was genuinely unbearable to me at the time — I resisted the idea for years. Then, after 9th grade, I finally agreed to go to The Woodstock School in Mussoorie, Uttarakhand. I made that decision reluctantly. It turned out to be the best one of my life.

The Woodstock School sits in the Himalayan foothills, surrounded by forests full of green and, on clear days, mountains capped with snow as far as you can see. Below it, the small local town of Mussoorie — no big buildings, no industries, just small houses, shops, and a kind of quiet that makes you pay attention. It is, without question, the most beautiful place I have ever been. Being Asia's oldest boarding school, Woodstock lived up to its reputation. I met students and teachers from across the world and built relationships I still carry. But more than anything, Woodstock gave me a hunger for more — more people, more places, more things I hadn't seen yet. That hunger is what eventually pointed me toward NC State.

But the moment I decided to become an aerospace engineer happened long before Woodstock or North Carolina.

The moment

I distinctly remember being in 6th grade when I sat on a plane for a family vacation. The second I was in my seat, I turned to the window and I didn't look away for the entire flight. What fascinated me wasn't the view — it was the preflight checks. The pilots going through their systematic routine, the sound of the mechanisms cycling, the spoilers on the wings moving in sequence. I kept asking myself: how can something this heavy actually fly?

I spent that whole flight staring out the window, thinking about nothing else. When I got home, I looked it up — who designs and builds airplanes? The first answer that came up was Aeronautical and Aerospace Engineers. And at that very moment, I had decided. If I was going to earn a degree, it would be in Aerospace Engineering. I didn't need any more convincing.

Years later, I made it to North Carolina State University to do exactly that — pursuing a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering with a minor in Business Entrepreneurship, because I never wanted to think about engineering separately from the real world it operates in. Since then, I've built and flight-tested a glider, designed a liquid rocket engine on paper, led thermal and financial design on a NASA RASCAL lunar rover concept, and wrote a 2D CFD solver from scratch in MATLAB. None of that happened because I was the most naturally talented person in the room. It happened because I kept showing up, kept following through, and kept treating every gap between what I predicted and what actually happened as information rather than a reason to stop.

Looking back from where I am now, I feel extremely grateful — to my parents, who never stopped pushing me and never stopped believing; to my family, who shaped me in ways I'm still discovering; and to my friends along every part of the journey, who made all of it worth doing. My story, from a joint family in Rajkot to a 6th-grade airplane window to a NASA rover concept, is the best evidence I have for the principle I live by: if you try, go all the way through.