I chose a challenging ITC master's programme to address my passions in climate change and sustainability and to learn technology skills.
Vijayudu Kondi (from India) is passionate about climate change and sustainability. After working for three years in a startup he felt that improving his technical skills in earth observation would help achieve his goal of building climate and sustainability products. He had several options to pursue his studies at colleges and universities globally including Singapore National University, University of Melbourne, Algonquin College in Canada, Wageningen University, ETH Zurich, and ITC (at the University of Twente).
I chose ITC because it is a pioneer in Earth Observation and has many success stories in climate change and sustainability. It offers the ITC Excellence scholarship. There is no language barrier, as more than 90% of the people speak English. The Netherlands is advanced in sustainability, the Dutch are very friendly, there is a low crime rate, and ITC is quite famous in Indian government organisations like ISRO, Survey of India, and NRSC.
Geoinformatics specialisation
I have chosen Geoinformatics (GIS) because I wanted to master technology. It was considered to be the toughest of all. It is good to challenge yourself now and then!
For me, this specialisation has two advantages:
- There is a good employability scope for IT talent in the EU.
- IT skills + GIS + domain expertise is a rare combination one could find. This combination can solve a lot of problems in the IT industry. It’s like a Developer + technician + Subject Matter Expert in one person.
This combination has made me a critical researcher after my studies at ITC.
Big data & bird appearances
My master thesis assignment was "A big data approach to model bird occurrence from crowdsourced data". I have built a model to map multiple bird species present and absent seasonally in the Netherlands. I had the best learning on problem-solving, research thinking and writing, and data analytics during this period. There was a situation where I almost lost confidence in completing my project but with hope and perseverance, I recovered and completed the assignment. During this hard time, I got good support from multiple people – like my supervisor Dr. Ir. Rolf de By - in ITC.
Life after graduation
I returned to my home country immediately after graduation. Simultaneously, I got a job and planned a startup. After 2.5 years I found a co-founder, Mr. Kapil Kumar Chawala, who is running a geospatial IT services company since 2018. When I visit the Netherlands in December 2024, I will look for local partners and collaborations for our startup earthsmart.ai.
Today, I am a Geospatial Consultant Lead. I design digital or IT products for the climate, sustainability and agriculture domains. I act as a bridge between the IT team and clients who are mostly researchers from CGIAR. At earthsmart.ai, I am the co-founder and product architect where I built a Carbon Assistant, an AI assistant for registration, monitoring, and validation of carbon credits.
My experiences living in the Netherlands
Living in the Netherlands is a great experience and you should try it just as I did during a master’s programme at the ITC faculty with legendary professors. The diversity of courses and skills is a great opportunity to learn what you want and if you want to do cutting-edge research you are at the right spot at ITC. Via LinkedIn, I am still in contact with UT, ITC, and my peers.
