Pardeep Kumar
My story
An engineer and researcher of more than a decade, and why the skills school never taught me are the ones I now care most about.
I trained as an engineer, spent more than ten years on hard technical problems in two countries, and have arrived at the conviction that the most useful thing I can do next is in school education.
A path across disciplines and borders
I trained in aerospace engineering at IIT Bombay, completing my MSc in 2014. My career began in India, building simulation and engineering software. I moved to the Netherlands in 2019.
Over more than ten years, I have worked across energy, semiconductors, engineering software, finance, and scientific research. That journey includes Fluidyn, Altair, KLA-Tencor, Aakraya Research, Shell, and ASM International.
After eight years as a working software professional, I began a doctorate in 2022. My research at CWI Amsterdam and TU Delft focused on scientific computing and numerical methods. My thesis has been submitted and approved, and the defence is scheduled for January 2027 at TU Delft. The work strengthened habits I value in any endeavour: making assumptions explicit, testing ideas carefully, and following through on difficult problems.
What I noticed
I went to school in my village until lower middle school, and from grade 8 to a school in a tier-3 town. Both were organised around rote learning. When I talk to people from towns like it today, I do not hear that a great deal has changed, though I can only speak to what I have seen myself and been told.
Moving to the Netherlands in 2019 gave me something to compare my own schooling against. I want to be careful about what I am claiming here. This is one person’s observation over several years rather than a study, and it is certainly not a claim that children here are cleverer. What I notice is that their schools deliberately spend time on things mine never touched. Children are taught to argue a point and to be argued with. To work in a group. To stand on a stage and hold a room. To make a presentation. To take a decision and answer for it. To play a sport and lose a match without it becoming a catastrophe. To notice where another person’s boundary is and stop there. To sit with their own attention. As far as I can see, none of this is treated as an extra. It is simply part of what a school is for.
My university did not address these things either, and it was only once I was working that I understood what I had missed. Technical rigour I had. The rest I had to assemble on my own, late, and in public: communication, collaboration, and the ability to ask a good research question rather than answer someone else’s.
A doctorate does not close that gap, which surprised me. In my own conversations with peers across research groups, the same absence keeps coming up. TU Delft does introduce soft-skills courses, engineering ethics among them, and I am glad it does. But they run fast, and they arrive when you are already thirty. What they mostly did was leave me wondering why any of it waits that long.
A related thought arrives from the other direction. Out of curiosity I have followed where India’s very highest exam rankers end up, and what struck me is how few of them go on to build something of their own. I have not studied this properly and I would not want to lean on it too hard. But these are, by any measure, extraordinarily capable people, and what I think I am looking at is not a shortage of ability. It looks more like a shortage of practice, at an age when practice is cheap.
From ideas to execution
I enjoy building things that people can use. Alongside my engineering work, I have independently designed and developed digital products, including a civic strategy simulation, an Indian news platform, a multiplayer chess application, and a project workspace.
Those projects come from the same instinct that draws me to education: understand a need, think carefully about the experience of the person on the other side, and do the work to make an idea actually useful.
If you want the technical detail, it lives on my background pages: engineering, research, publications, talks, and independent products.
Why education
Mathematics, physics, and computation have been central to my own learning. I know how much the right explanation, example, or question can change someone’s understanding of a difficult subject. I also know the opposite: how quickly a child decides a subject is “not for them” when nobody takes the time to ask what they are actually confused about.
Research trains you to be comfortable not knowing. You sit with a problem, you keep asking why, you accept being wrong in public, and eventually something opens up. I have never understood why that way of working is treated as an advanced skill reserved for graduate students, rather than the ordinary way a curious ten-year-old could be taught.
What I care about is that curiosity, real understanding, and the skills a person actually lives by stop being things that follow family income or postcode. That conviction is set out in full here.
Beyond work
I enjoy ping-pong, cooking Indian food, and exploring Indian philosophy. These interests keep me curious about the ways people learn, think, and live.
Start a conversation
I would like to hear from teachers, school leaders, parents, and anyone who thinks seriously about how children are taught.