Episode 3 | Part 1

Does a highly successful career and education prevent you from feeling exhausted by your path? Can it give you perspective on the hustle? Do years of being a good kid and following a path burn you out? Or can it empower you? Does society force you down certain paths? Are our choices are own? 

In this episode, we learn from Shouvik Sachdeva's journey from Chandigarh to IIT-Kanpur to New York City.  Shouvik is a trader with Tower Research in New York City. He has previously spent a decade at World Quant and is an alumni of IIT-Kanpur, one of the premier technical institutes in India. 

Enjoy this gezellig chat in the Scottish countryside that is touched by so much of American and Indian Culture. 

Part 1 of the episode  is about early life paths, expectations and the discovery of that languishing feeling. We talk through Shouvik's early life in Chandigarh, the impact of his family and siblings, his boarding school experience at Lawrence Sanawar in the Himalayas in India, the impact of sport on his life and what the emotional setups of a good Indian kid are.

### Timecodes

0:00 - Intro

1:40 - Explaining why we're by a highway

2:17 - How we met

02:47 - Shouvik’s path and career

04:49 - How Chandigarh, North Indian culture & IIT shaped him

06:59 - Kids are different in Scotland

07:25 - Middle class Indian family values

09:39 - Boarding school at Lawrence Sanawar

12:39 - Early expectations from life path

15:28 - Preparing for IIT and engineering

19:22 - Dopamine to crack engineering exams

22:43 - Exit from IIT and path to New York

28:00 - The not so thought out decision into finance

31:03 - Needing a new challenge, languishing

33:57 - Expectation vs reality mismatches

37:52 - Outro