This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Chandana Shivanand, 32, an Indian National and cofounder of Polygnan, a nonprofit that supports engineering students in India. It has been edited for length and clarity.
I was born in India and brought up in a small city about 60 miles northeast of Bengaluru.
During my third year of undergrad, my mother encouraged me to look for opportunities abroad. I graduated in 2016 and moved to the US a few months later to pursue a master’s in electrical engineering at the University of Southern California.
I went on to work as a senior technical program manager at Meta. I briefly moved to Microsoft because I wanted to learn from its larger community of program and product managers, but I was back at Meta in less than seven months.
My now-husband Prajwal and I had an arranged marriage in 2021. We rented a two-bedroom apartment in Santa Clara and lived there for about two years before eventually buying our own home.
We wanted to do more than send money home
I have always been interested in giving back to society, and I started volunteering in high school.
After getting married, Prajwal and I established a charity back in India. But we were in the US, and our parents were hosting activities on our behalf. We began asking ourselves whether there was a better way to give back than simply sending money.
In 2023, we started Global Engineers Connect with about 35 friends and professionals from our networks around the world. We wanted to help engineering students from rural India tackle real problems within their own communities. We gave small amounts for social impact projects, along with mentorship, mock interviews, résumé reviews, and referrals.
In February 2024, after organizing a full-day event back on the campus where I had studied for undergrad, my husband asked me whether I wanted to move back to India. I said yes without a second thought.
We asked ourselves why we were always associating our lives with our careers. Was working at Meta a better thing than following my passion? We had enough of a financial cushion to explore what we were passionate about, so nothing scared us. We decided to give ourselves two years in India, and both moved toward the end of 2024.
Initially, we rented out our home in the US rather than selling it, keeping the option of returning if things didn’t work out. I moved back with just 11 boxes of belongings. Two years later, we sold our house in California to a neighbor, completing the transaction through an online notary. We had purchased it for $1.7 million and sold it for $2 million.
We returned to India to figure out what came next
We knew we wanted to work in social impact, particularly education, but we weren’t planning to start an organization immediately. We wanted to explore and figure things out first.
Our strength was engineering. I had worked in AI and network infrastructure, while Prajwal had worked at Oracle. We also had a global network of more than 150 mentors who could support aspiring engineers.
We now have two main programs: entrepreneurship and AI. Through the entrepreneurship program, we incubate engineering students for 10 weeks to help them develop an idea into a minimum viable product.
In the beginning, it was chaotic. Adjusting to the Indian work culture, traffic, pollution, and societal expectations wasn’t easy. We made a conscious decision to live independently of our parents and rented a five-bedroom villa, which also became our office.
I don’t regret returning to India. Working at Big Tech companies gave me the exposure, confidence, and financial backing to make this decision. In India, the highs are very high, and the lows can be equally intense. But there has been flexibility, freedom, and support to figure out the path we want.
If I had stayed in India, I don’t think I would have started my nonprofit this early. Going to the US, getting that exposure, and then coming back to India made much more sense for me. Otherwise, I would always think the grass is greener on the other side. Now I know both ways of life, and I can make a conscious decision about the lifestyle that works for my dreams, passion, and vision.
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