I always wanted to share my journey on what went through my mind when deciding on whether to pursue masters in US or not. There's a version of this story where I never leave. Where the admit letter from UIUC sits unused, where I stay at the company I was working, get promoted, stay with my family, and tell people years later that grad school "just wasn't for me." That version isn't hypothetical it was the default outcome for most of 2023.
This is the story of how I made that decision.
The life before
I was working as a Senior Software Engineer at a good startup back in India (see Shipsy), earning well for a fully remote role. I was enjoying my time with family, and enjoying the work itself just as much. My manager was really good, and my colleagues were equally amazing.
After about two years, despite not being particularly interested myself, I saw a friend actively applying for graduate programs, and that nudged me to apply as well. I prepared my statement of purpose, took the GRE, TOEFL, got letters of recommendation from both my undergrad professors and my manager, and applied to only a few of the top 5 universities for Computer Science.
Refusing the opportunity
I got admits from good universities like Georgia Tech, CMU, UIUC. My friend, who'd also applied to good schools, got in too. And at that point, I was still not convinced. When I saw the tuition fees, I was genuinely shaken. The numbers on those admission portals were more than my parents had spent on my entire schooling and undergraduate education combined, several times over.
For a moment the whole plan felt absurd: take on that kind of debt, leave a job and a life I liked, for a degree I wasn't even sure I wanted. But somewhere underneath that, I also knew I was too comfortable, and not growing the way I wanted to.
At this point my friend who initially was the most excited one to go pursue masters, dropped the plan entirely. It was a strange twist. The person whose excitement had set this whole thing in motion for me was now the one backing out, while I the reluctant one who'd applied almost as an afterthought was still standing at the edge, deciding whether to jump. Part of me wanted to use his decision as permission to quietly let mine go too. It would have been easy. I already had the job, the team, the life. Nobody would have questioned it. But I still accepted the admit from UIUC since it was a Spring admit I thought I will have some time to think through this as it was still August and I had to join in January. Now I had everything ready: the admit, the visa, a rough plan taking shape and yet somehow I still hadn't fully made peace with any of it. I kept telling myself I'd figure it out once I actually got there.
The stranger who wasn't selling anything
I got a call from someone who had spoken with my father before, he'd attended the same undergrad program at PICT, though almost a decade earlier. He was in the US, having worked at a lot of big-tech companies and startups alike, and had spent more than a decade there. It was clear he wasn't just calling to make small talk he had something he wanted to tell me.
He convinced me about the opportunity that is present on this side of the world not in the vague, brochure way relatives usually talk about "settling abroad," but with actual specifics: the kind of teams he'd worked on, the scale of problems he got to solve, the fact that a title like "Senior Engineer" back home didn't always mean the same depth of ownership it did here and also about the school that I was planning on joining. He wasn't selling me a dream. He was walking me through his own decade, year by year, and letting me draw my own conclusions.
I was like, I don't even know this person properly, why is he so excited about an opportunity that's mine and not his? I am still not sure what he saw in me but he had a belief that I can make it here and that I shouldn't just be in my comfort zone.
Weighing the voices
It's November now, I procrastinated making this decision for weeks, circling it instead of sitting with it. I had a chat with my manager about this and he told me that he also had a very similar opportunity but he decided not to pursue that and still regrets not going with it since all his peers are now doing well in whatever opportunities they were presented with when they went. I also had a chat with my friends and seniors who were already in US and they told me about life, career prospects and the kind of people you meet here.
Once I'd named what this decision was really about, I still needed to see it laid out plainly. So I made a list.
Pros
| # | Factor |
|---|---|
| 1 | UIUC is ranked among the top research programs globally, and its CS department sits just behind CMU, MIT, UC Berkeley, and Stanford |
| 2 | The name carries real weight, other CS students and industry peers react differently once they hear it |
| 3 | Most people I trust and respect were encouraging me to go |
| 4 | Some had reservations about the new spring-intake structure, but others felt it was too new to have proven downsides yet |
| 5 | Cost of living in Urbana-Champaign is far lower than in New York or California |
| 6 | Genuine chance for growth it would force me out of my comfort zone |
| 7 | With close to three years of work experience, I would be in a very good spot |
| 8 | The admitted cohort was strong IIT/NIT grads, a few former founders, engineers from companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Flipkart |
| 9 | The job market was rough at the time, but by graduation (May '25) it could look very different mostly a matter of timing and luck |
Cons
| # | Factor |
|---|---|
| 1 | Tuition was high compared to schools like SUNY or SJSU |
| 2 | Weather was noticeably worse than the West Coast |
| 3 | At least one person I trusted was advising against it |
| 4 | Contact with friends back home would become mostly remote |
| 5 | Being away from family for at least a year and a half |
| 6 | Giving up a year and a half of salary |
| 7 | Leaving a good, permanent, fully remote job |
| 8 | Missing family functions and events during that time |
| 9 | The US job market was weak at the time full-time roles were hard to come by |
Laid out like that, the list didn't make the decision for me. Nothing on either side was big enough to tip it alone.
The realization
This wasn't a decision a spreadsheet could make. It was a decision about who I wanted to become, and no row in a table could answer that. What I hadn't done, through all those conversations and planning, was ask myself a simpler question: not "should I go," but "who do I become if I don't." My manager's regret wasn't really about the job he stayed in, it was about the version of himself he'd never gotten to meet. The stranger on the phone wasn't trying to convince me the US was better. He was showing me a decade of a life I couldn't picture from inside my comfort zone, because I'd never had to build one.
I realized I'd spent three months treating this like a financial decision, when it was actually an identity decision wearing a financial decision's clothes. The tuition number never got smaller. I just stopped asking it to justify the choice on its own.
I had never stepped foot outside of my house. I had always stayed with my parents even during my undergraduate time. They'd handled a lot of the decisions in my life without either of us really noticing it happening, and looking back, I think that had quietly stunted my growth. Living independently, I realized, wasn't a side effect of going abroad, it was one of the actual reasons to go.
I could have gotten some of that independence by taking a job elsewhere in India instead, moving cities, finding my own place, figuring things out on my own terms. But that path only solved half the problem. Leaving the country meant moving to a place which is well beyond my comfort zone not just in career terms but in day to day life as well.
And don't get me wrong I love my parents, they've given me everything I have, and staying close to them was something that I cherished and loved. They were the ones to motivate me to pursue this opportunity despite them knowing that I will be staying away from them for a long time. But there's a difference between choosing to be near people and never having tested what you'd do without them. I didn't know how to cook a proper meal, manage myself, or make a decision without first running it by someone at home. That wasn't a criticism of them, it was just the shape my life had taken by default. Going abroad meant all of that would have to change at once, not because I wanted to get away from my parents, but because I finally wanted to find out who I was when nobody was there to catch me.
Where I ended up
I still think about the version of me who stayed promoted, comfortable, telling people grad school "wasn't for me." I don't think he'd be unhappy.
That's what made the decision hard: I wasn't running from something bad. I was choosing to leave something good for something unproven but exciting.
I got on the plane in January not because I'd resolved every doubt, but because I'd finally understood what the doubt was actually about.
Thanks for reading. If you're weighing a similar decision and want to talk it through, feel free to reach out I'm always happy to help. In the next article, I'll pick up where this one leaves off: my graduate program journey in the US, and how I payed no tuition and landed a Research Assistantship.