when jhansi pantala decided she wanted to pursue a career her family and everyone else around asked her to become a teacher they felt that was the only career that would get a good groom but jhansi wanted to do engineering jhansi grew up in vizag her father was in a government agency her mother a homemaker the family also had concerns about how they could pay for an engineering educationjhansi was a good student throughout school and she made it to the national institute of technology nit in warangal since it was a government institution the fees were reasonable jhansi picked chemical engineering there wasnt a lot of drama when she took up the course but it did take a few sessions to explain to her family the scope of an engineer jhansi is the first girl in her family to go to college i would try to educate my parents about what engineers do and the different kinds of engineering so that they appreciate my work more they were proud that i chose to have a career but it is good to involve them in the journey she saysat nit she was the topper in her stream after she graduated jhansi took up a job not in chemical engineering but in it the opportunities in it were way more than in chemical engineering but she had other considerations too choosing chemical engineering would have meant being posted in remote areas at some refinery of a public sector undertaking or something that might have meant i would not be able to continue working in the long run my family wanted me to be closer to them that is another reason why i chose it she says through much of her career she has been in hyderabad with it companies like valuelabs and pegasystems and now with uber where she is an engineering managerwhen she told her family about her plan to shift to it they saved money to buy extra books for her to learn concepts in the field jhansis shift from chemical engineering to it happened long before edtech players emerged to make these transitions relatively easy it was particularly difficult for jhansi because many of her colleagues who had graduated in softwarerelated fields were wellversed in its basic concepts she had to pick all that up on the job she had to put in extra efforts to ask and learn and pick up conceptsjhansi says you need to have an analytical mind to become a software engineer she says it helps if you love solving mathematical puzzles today after working in the it industry for nearly two decades she is the inspiration for all the girls in her family