The UPSC years
I studied for the Civil Services and it rewired how I think
A computer science graduate who spent years inside history, polity, economics and anthropology. It was the hardest thing I have done, and the most useful — not because of the exam, but because of what it did to the way I read the world.
01
A CS degree, then everything it left out
I trained as a computer scientist. I could reason about systems, data structures and complexity — and almost nothing about how a country actually works. The syllabus for the Civil Services is the opposite of a specialist's education. It asks you to hold the Constitution, the monsoon, the Mughals, the balance of payments and the ethics of public office in the same head, at the same time.
So I went and learnt it. Not as a hobby, but the way you learn something when an exam will find every gap you left.
02
The part nobody puts on a CV
It was brutal. Years of it. Revision cycles that erase what you learnt last month, mock scores that refuse to move, and the particular loneliness of a preparation nobody around you can see the point of. UPSC does not care how clever you were at university. It finds the ego and it removes it.
I am not going to dress that up. But I would not undo it either.
“Choose the torture you are comfortable with.”
03
What I actually studied
Fourteen subjects, none of them mine to begin with. Anthropology was my optional — a whole discipline chosen from scratch, and the one that changed the most in me.
Every note I made is here: 371 sets across twelve subject areas, with the diagrams, tables and figures intact.
04
The new angle
Here is what I did not expect. Studying the humanities did not replace the engineer in me — it gave him somewhere to stand.
Anthropology taught me that a user is a person inside a culture, not a row in a database. Polity taught me that every system has a constitution, written or not, and that the informal one usually wins. Economics taught me to look for the incentive before the intention. History taught me that almost nothing is new, and that the second-order effect is the one that matters.
I read problems differently now. A product decision, a market, a team — they all have structure, history and incentives underneath them. That is a humanities habit applied with an engineer's tools, and it is the single most useful thing I own.
05
Where the CS grad came back
The preparation is an information problem — thousands of pages, lectures and current affairs that must be compressed into something revisable. So I built a system for it, which is the one place my degree was an unfair advantage.
Structured note pipelines
Raw lecture transcripts run through a fixed prompt: correct the flow, remove redundancy, rebuild as nested numbered bullets — while losing no fact, concept or definition.
Linking statements
Every point ends with a line connecting it to the next, so the notes carry their own cohesion instead of being a list of disconnected facts.
A revisable corpus
372 note sets and a 152-entry vocabulary, organised so that any topic can be found and revised on a schedule rather than re-read from scratch.
06
What kept me going
Lines I wrote on the wall of the preparation, and read on the days it was not working.
Someone is studying right now, to beat you in the competition.
Pain of hard work versus the hard work of failure.
If you can't revise it, don't read it or make notes out of it.
UPSC will cut down the ego of everyone.
Labour passes quickly, but the fruit endures.
You will regret the things you didn't do, or avoided.
07
What came out of it
The notes, the structure and the method eventually became something other aspirants could use. That work lives at UPSC Vision — a platform built around how people actually study for this exam, rather than how coaching assumes they do.