How I Went from Fresher to Engineer at an AI Startup — My Honest 2-Year Journey

Meta description: A software engineer's honest career journey in India — from college at AKTU to working at an AI startup. Real lessons, mistakes, and practical tips for freshers starting out. Two years ago, I was a final-year IT student at Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam Technical University with zero industry experience, a GitHub with three half-finished projects, and a browser history full of "how to get a software engineering job in India" searches. Today, I'm a Member of Technical Staff at TestMu AI — an AI-powered testing startup in Noida — and I recently shipped my first open-source npm package, webguardx, which crossed 50 stars in its first week. This isn't a motivational post. It's the unfiltered version of what my software engineer career journey in India actually looked like — the internships, the rejections, the skills I had to teach myself, and the things nobody told me in college. If you're a fresher trying to figure out your path, keep reading. I wish someone had written this for