BetterMind Alumni | Batch June 2024
Havisha Jaitley
Computer Science Grad, Prude University, Indiana
A Quiet Shift Toward Understanding
When Havisha talks about where she began, she doesn’t describe it as uncertainty or confusion. She was curious, motivated, and already interested in computer science. What she didn’t yet have was a way to connect ideas into something cohesive.
“I knew some of the terms,” she reflects, “but I didn’t really know how they fit together.”
That gap wasn’t about effort or intelligence. It was about exposure. About seeing how abstract concepts behaved when applied to real problems.
From Terms to Meaning
Early on, Havisha encountered ideas she had seen before, things like tokenization and embeddings. Previously, they had existed as definitions. Separate. Memorized. This time, they appeared in context.
Instead of learning concepts in isolation, she was forced to slow down and ask what each step was actually doing and why it mattered. How text becomes data. How meaning is approximated. How decisions are made inside a model.
“It made me think more carefully,” she says. “Not just about getting something to work, but about understanding what was happening underneath.”
That distinction mattered. It shifted her focus from completion to comprehension.
Her College Application Strategy
The most meaningful change wasn’t technical. It was cognitive. Rather than following instructions, Havisha had to reason through choices. Why structure data a certain way. Why one approach felt more appropriate than another. Why outcomes weren’t always clean or definitive.
Some challenges surfaced naturally. Interpreting data correctly. Deciding how to label results. Making sense of ambiguity instead of avoiding it.
“I had to explain my thinking,” she notes. “That made the gaps more obvious, but it also helped me grow.”
The process didn’t remove difficulty. It made it visible. And that visibility became useful.
Confidence That Comes From Clarity
By the end, the biggest shift wasn’t mastery. It was confidence grounded in understanding.
“I felt like I could talk about my interests more clearly,” Havisha explains. “Not just say I liked something, but explain why.”
That clarity changed how she thought about next steps. Interests felt more deliberate.
Decisions felt less rushed. There was a sense of ownership over what she was learning and where she wanted to explore further. “I wasn’t guessing as much anymore.”
Looking Back
Havisha doesn’t describe her journey as dramatic. There was no sudden transformation. No single moment of realization.
Just a gradual shift. A better grasp of how ideas connect. More confidence in her reasoning. A clearer sense of direction.
For students like her, and for families watching closely, that kind of progress often matters the most
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