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Some of what I learned at NIIT University never happened in a classroom. On the dance club floor — where a performance only works if every single person owns their part — I first understood what real ownership feels like. And in my fourth year, mentoring anxious freshers through their onboarding week, I discovered that guiding people through the unfamiliar is a skill in itself. Years later, both turned out to be exactly what a career in information security would ask of me.
My four years in Computer Engineering at NU were less about memorising answers and more about building a mindset. The hands-on learning, the steady pull towards emerging technology, and the constant exposure to real-world problems taught me to think critically, adapt quickly, and never stop learning.
That mindset carried me from my very first role — a Software Developer Intern at PayU — into a field I grew to love. Over nearly a decade across EY, Expedia Group, Gojek, Zomato, and SirionLabs, I moved from writing code to securing it, specialising in cybersecurity, data privacy, and IT governance across frameworks like GDPR, SOC 2, and ISO 27001. Today I help organisations navigate an increasingly complex security landscape — and, more recently, the emerging frontier of AI governance, where I work with standards like ISO 42001.
The ownership I first felt on a dance stage now shapes work where trust is everything; the instinct to guide others, sparked during those fresher onboarding weeks, is the same one I lean on when helping teams make sense of regulation and risk. NU never just taught me what to think — it taught me how to think, how to solve problems, and how to keep evolving in a field that changes by the day. Initiatives like the Annual Information Security Summit, in partnership with NASSCOM and the Data Security Council of India, capture that spirit perfectly, putting students face to face with the people and ideas shaping tomorrow.
I’m proud to be part of the NU community — and prouder still to watch it keep preparing the next generation for careers that don’t yet exist.
Garima Kakkar
