Joseph Jonathan Fernandes
In Margao, Goa, Joseph Jonathan Fernandis keeps a diary just for exam dates. Not his own college exams, the other ones. Every semester, when the university releases its list of NPTEL electives eligible for honours credit, he opens the notebook first, checks which subjects might overlap, and starts building a season around them. He is a final-year student at Goa College of Engineering and will graduate this year with 47 NPTEL courses completed. He started in semester 3, when his college began counting NPTEL credits towards an honours degree, and by semester 7, while also managing an internship, he was taking 12 courses in a single term.
What began as a hunt for credits turned into something much more personal. Joseph describes his college curriculum as feeling “designed in 1920,” and admits he was restless with the idea of doing the bare minimum. NPTEL gave him theory the way he wanted it: unhurried, deep, taught by people he still cannot always name but remembers distinctly, especially an 8 week soft-skills course that shaped how he speaks in interviews and debates today.
The scaling up was not without cost. Joseph talks about imposter syndrome plainly, the sense of being teased for spending a thousand rupees on a course while classmates chased internships or looked elsewhere.
That thousand rupees, he says, has sometimes taught him more than what he paid in college fees—and he says it without apology.
He is careful about what NPTEL is not. He evaluates every course for two weeks before registering for the exam, checking whether he can solve 6 out of 10 questions in an assignment without help, whether the subject goes beyond what his college already covers. If a course fails that test, he drops it. This is deliberate, unglamorous, and entirely his own system.
In January, he travelled to IIT Bombay for the NPTEL Superstar event, sitting near the back until his name was called. He was, by his own count, one of the youngest people in the room, surrounded by people who had completed 80 or 90 courses. Rather than intimidation, he found company among people from very different backgrounds, including a pharmacy graduate who told him how NPTEL had helped him too, classmates from Goa who would later ask him for advice on LinkedIn. Some of that encouragement started at home. His mother, a professor at a polytechnic, takes IIT courses herself and has told him more than once that this particular kind of teaching cannot be found anywhere else. He has also qualified for GATE in both Computer Science and Data Science, in 2025 and 2026 respectively, and remains undecided between further study, competitive exams, or placements, treating the uncertainty itself as something to sit with rather than resolve.
Joseph is quick to say he is not selling NPTEL. He is suspicious of those who take it only to copy assignments, chasing the certificate rather than the concept. His advice for the undecided is blunt for someone recruiting others to his own enthusiasm: skip it if you are not curious.
What he keeps returning to, in his own words, is a kind of appetite that will not switch off.
Once you get the hang of curiosity, he says, it is like a bug that will not disappear. For Joseph, that bug arrived in semester 3 and has not left since.
~written by Elsa Prasad