The Part a Resume Leaves Out
Four things that explain more about how I work than any bullet point does.
I did not speak until I was four
I grew up in a three-language household. Tamil and Telugu, with English filling the gaps, and all three arrived at once, late. Words came slowly, so I used my hands instead. That habit never left. It is why I end up as the person explaining the thing, translating between people who are not quite hearing each other yet, whether that is at a family Thanksgiving or in a project meeting.
The Varun Method
Junior year I took on tutoring remediation Algebra 1 instead of taking a free period. The students were not confused so much as convinced they could not do it. I dropped the formal language, broke everything down to its smallest step, and built a shortcut for factoring messy polynomials that the class named after me. It spread to their homework, their flashcards, all four whiteboards. Over 70% of them advanced.
I read the CPI for fun
The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes the Consumer Price Index every month. For a long stretch of high school I did not miss an issue. I opened the first one understanding almost none of it, which was the point. The size of the thing was the appeal. That is the habit underneath the data work: sit with a dataset until it starts saying something.
A lost bet and a microphone
I came last in my friends' fantasy football league. The punishment was unscripted stand-up for a room of sixty senior citizens at a retirement home. I brought a page of dad jokes and never looked at it. Twenty minutes, standing ovation. I have not been nervous about speaking to a room since.
Why AI, specifically
In 2017 I spent eleven days in the ICU after a seizure, relearning things I had never had to think about. On discharge I asked the doctor what had happened. She told me they did not really know.
I went looking myself, on and off, for five years. What finally closed the question was an AI diagnostic tool that pointed to encephalitis in about twenty minutes. An uncertainty that had lasted most of my childhood, answered by software, faster than I could make a cup of coffee. I have been chasing that category of tool ever since, which is how I ended up spending a summer evaluating where language models genuinely replace human work and where they only appear to.
How I Got Into Data
My dad handed me numbers early. The rest I found on my own.
Sixth GradeRan surveys on my classmates. What they ate for dinner, how they rated our teacher, mostly to Mrs. Schneiders' irritation. The results kept contradicting what I assumed. That was the hook.
High SchoolTaught myself pandas, placed in the UBER Hackathon, and led statistics-driven organizations at school.
OutsideConnectionJoined with one goal: use numbers for something that mattered. Started by untangling a database of thousands of job listings, scraping, cleaning, and structuring it into a system that surfaced over 1,900 openings for reentrants and people leaving incarceration.
SummersWashed windows across the Central Valley, working alongside Hispanic and Latino crews. Some of the best conversations I have had about work came from those jobs.
