Success Stories: Deepthi Sreenivasaiah

Berlin Buzzwords Success Stories is our brand new blog series where we ask people in the bbuzz network to share their own story.

Part of ensuring a wide range of opinions and ideas can be shared at Berlin Buzzwords is ensuring that people from underrepresented groups within the Berlin Buzzwords community can attend and engage with the discussions. Historically Berlin Buzzwords, like the tech scene at large, has been a pretty white and male dominated space.

One way we want to change this is to highlight some of the voices of people in our network from underrepresented groups. We want to share their stories and learn what drove them in their careers.Today, we hear from Deepthi Sreenivasaiah. She is a Machine Intelligence Engineer at Merantix and saw the other success stories here and decided to take part. Welcome Deepthi, we're glad to share your story here.

Being raised in a family where both my parents are engineers, there was some natural affinity towards technology since my childhood. When I was taught to build an AM radio receiver in my 8th grade as a hobby project, I was curious to see it working even though I did not fully understand the electronics behind it. This motivated me to learn basic electronics as a part of the HAM radio license examination which I passed at the age of 12.
The excitement grew along with me and I became passionate about technology. After my 12th grade, there came a time in my life, where I really had to make a choice between medicine and engineering. That was at the cost of dropping my medical seat in one of the prestigious colleges in my state in India. This moment was a big turning point in my life. Although it was a tough decision, now when I look back, I think I made the best decision of my life. I followed my passion to pursue my bachelors degree in electronics and communication engineering.

After completing undergrad with flying colors, I landed a job in what was considered a “core company” in my domain. There I was, who started with a mini AM radio now designing big hardware devices. Things went rather smoothly until I started realizing that I was getting too comfortable with my position in life. To get out of that comfort zone and explore new fields, I decided to continue my technical education further by pursuing my masters at University of Stuttgart and I made a transition to Information Technology. Moving to a new city in a different continent with a different culture and language altogether was not an easy decision. Despite a lot of hurdles and risks, I took this “unconventional path”. I always thought continuous learning is a part of life and this decision was a consequence of it. When I joined my masters, I only had a bare minimum knowledge in programming and that posed a major challenge in front of me. I was struggling to keep up with my fellow classmates who had prior experience in the software field. I accepted this challenge and grasped each and every opportunity that came in my way, I never looked back. As mathematics is my all-time favourite subject, I got interested in artificial intelligence. Very soon I was motivated to be a part of this emerging technology. After successfully completing my masters in Information Technology, I was thrilled to join Merantix Labs as a Machine Learning Engineer and delve deeper into the practical challenges of machine learning. At Merantix Labs, I work on exciting projects in the area of computer vision, related to both
research and industrial applications. In short, this is how I made my way into Berlin’s AI startup ecosystem. With lots of turning points and challenges, this is my story.

In all these years, not even once there was a thought in my mind that I, as a woman, cannot make it in a tech field.As it is said, Dream big, because until you do, you do not realize the true potential of yourself :)

What about you? Do you want to share your story here too? Feel inspired by the stories you read? Don’t hesitate to contact us at info@berlinbuzzwords.de