mec on Aldrin Jenson

That time my college put me on its homepage

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:00:00 -0400

In May 2026 I was approved for an O-1 visa. It’s the US visa for people with “extraordinary ability”, which is a very grand name for something that mostly involved me collecting documents for months.

The fun part came a few weeks later. Someone from my college, Model Engineering College in Kochi, messaged asking if they could share the news. I said yes, a little nervously.

The first poster they made used an old, blurry group photo of me that had been run through some AI filter. The person on it did not really look like me. By the time I saw it, it had already gone out to a few WhatsApp groups. 🙂 I sent them a proper photo, they fixed it, and the fixed version ended up as the very first thing on the college website. Statue of Liberty, American flag, the works.

mec.ac.in, July 9, 2026. Slide 1 of 18.

After that, teachers and students I had never met started sending me congratulations, and the alumni cell even did an Alumni Spotlight on LinkedIn. It was really kind, and honestly a little hard to know how to respond. I’ve always been more comfortable keeping things quiet than taking credit. My mom said it was good that it was out there, because it might make some kid at MEC think they could do it too. I hope she’s right.

Big thanks to everyone at Athena, my lawyers, and the people who took the time to write letters for me.

And in case anyone thinks I made this up, here’s an archived copy of the college homepage from that day.

My Honours degree, from Kerala's Education Minister

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 12:00:00 +0530

I was awarded the Bachelor’s in Technology with Honours in Machine Learning by R.Bindu - the honorable Minister of Higher Education of Kerala state.

This was given to around 50 people from the whole state who qualified that year.

Model Engineering College Students at University Convocation with our Former Principal

Speaking at MEC.Conf 2023

Sat, 07 Oct 2023 12:00:00 -0400

This was one of the great memories!

I was invited to give a talk on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) to an audience of around 150 people.

At first I was very hesitant. I gave the volunteers the contact number of a lot of other people. Still, in the end it came back to me due to multiple reasons. I spent days making a good presentation.

And it paid off! it paid off big time!!

This was one of the happiest moments. At the end of the talk, I got such great feedback that I was very proud and happy!

I talked about FOSS, the origins, the 4 freedoms, why one should care, how to get started etc. This was a topic that was very close to my heart.

Me showing how Open Source helped me build one of the most used project of mine - MEC Diffusion

With Iqbal and the organizing team

I was heavily inspired by a good friend Abraham Raji and a lot of very enthusiastic people from the FOSS community, because of which all the effort put into the talk felt very much worth it.

I used several real-life examples and analogies (the 4 Freedoms through a Masala Dosa example) to make the concepts much clearer and more relatable.