Biography|Sundar Pichai — The Metallurgy Degree He Took in This Building

People treat Sundar Pichai as a computer-science product who arrived at Google already named for Chrome. He was a metallurgical engineer first. The degree was a B.Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, awarded in 1993. The work happened on this campus, in the department now called Metallurgical and Materials Engineering. The main building in front of the visitor is the pin. Its sign still reads that the institute is dedicated to the service of the nation. Pichai Sundararajan was born on 10 June 1972. Public sources split the birth town between Madurai and Madras, later Chennai. What is not in dispute is where he grew up and where he trained: Ashok Nagar and Vana Vani in Chennai, then this campus in West Bengal. He did not study computer science here. He studied metal. Britannica and later university notes record an Institute Silver Medal with the degree. From this building he left for a materials-science master's at Stanford in 1995, then a Wharton MBA, then Applied Materials and McKinsey, then Google in 2004. A later campus tour film points to Nehru Hall and room B-308 as the hostel room he occupied. That room is still a working student room. This memory stays on the academic block, not the occupied hostel. The institute opened in 1951 in the old Hijli detention-camp buildings. The main block a visitor photographs today is the later civic face of that first IIT. A metallurgy graduate running a software company is not a contradiction on this lawn. The department trained people to think about materials, heat, and process. Chrome, Android, and the later CEO title sat on top of that habit, not instead of it. Photo: Ambuj Saxena, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Lukasz Kobus / European Commission, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.