From teacher to student: a Gujarat mother’s IIT Madras degree at 45

For 16 years, Jigisha Tailor taught electronics at an engineering college in Bharuch, Gujarat. Family responsibilities pulled her out of that classroom in 2019, and it would be three years before she returned to one — this time as a student herself, in a course her own son had introduced her to.

That course was IIT Madras’s online Bachelor of Science in Data Science and Applications, which her son Aditya Kapadia had enrolled in during 2021 at age 18, after the Covid-19 pandemic shut down campuses across the country. Data science and artificial intelligence interested him independent of the pandemic circumstances, and he initially combined the online course with a diploma at a college in Ahmedabad before dropping it once IIT Madras’s senate declared the online BS degree equivalent to a regular four-year programme.

Jigisha enrolled toward the end of 2022 after watching Aditya’s progress and being encouraged by him to sign up. The coursework in statistics and systems felt close enough to her electronics background to be familiar, yet different enough to require relearning mathematics and statistics before it became manageable. She leaned on the institute’s live doubt-clearing sessions, some running past midnight, and a WhatsApp group with her batchmates, while keeping her load to one or two subjects a semester against Aditya’s four — with a routine that began around 4:30 am and ran through study, chores and further coursework into the early afternoon.

Not everyone in the extended family understood the decision, but her husband, also a college professor, supported her through difficult phases, her father-in-law tracked her project deadlines, and her mother-in-law, who uses a wheelchair, also stayed involved. Over time, the pair’s relationship shifted from parent and child helping each other to something closer to peers, competing for the programme’s ‘S’ grade — its top distinction — with Aditya, ahead in the coursework, guiding her through later stages including viva examinations and online proctored exams.

Aditya completed his degree in 2024 and moved into a full-time role at Syngenta after interning there as a data science intern. Jigisha finished around the same time but chose to pause before job-hunting, with her younger son currently in Class 12; she has not ruled out returning to teaching, including guest lectures at her husband’s college.

The two had not even sat together during the convocation ceremony, since BS and diploma students were seated in separate sections — their joint appearance on stage was arranged only after a batchmate mentioned their story at a pre-convocation dinner, a moment neither of them had anticipated in advance.

Wikimedia Commons/by Tester051005