Pallavi Pendse
For more than fourteen years now, Pallavi Pendse has stood in front of classrooms teaching people how to communicate. She could deliver a session on professional excellence without batting an eye and could coach a room full of engineering students through difficult conversations, body language, and first impressions. What she couldn’t do, for a long time, was prove any of it on paper.
But all that changed in 2022, when she started working with an engineering college and was subtly nudged towards a platform that had never been on her radar: NPTEL. Before signing up, she did proper research on what exactly NPTEL was, how it worked and whether it could add value to the career she had built over the past fourteen years. She and her colleagues went digging through the literature offerings, half expecting to land on something conventional. Instead, she discovered two courses which seemed to be far more interesting, almost like a natural extension of her own field. Thus, she signed up for a course called ‘English Language for Competitive Exams’ and another titled ’Enhancing soft skills and Personality’.
As she confessed, her reaction to all of that at first was rather lukewarm: “Theek hai, chalo karte hain” (“Alright, then, let’s do it”), was all she could feel at the very beginning. But that attitude was soon changed once she started the course.
The eight-week course went from February to April, offered by IIT Kanpur and squeezed into the free space in her weekly schedule. “I was juggling between my job and studies,” she recollects. Weekdays were difficult to manage alongside her job and other editing work, so she reserved Saturdays for watching the videos and Sundays and Mondays for completing assignments, some of which were harder to understand than to complete. Every week brought a new assignment and completing the required number of assignments (within the deadline) was necessary to qualify for the exam. “If I am not doing my submissions,” she said, “I will not be able to take the test.”
Having designed her own sessions in soft skills for over ten years, she expected the course to offer little more than a refresher. Instead, she discovered a whole course, becoming increasingly difficult from week to week without being repetitive and building up on everything previously learned. One section stayed with her longer than the rest: a module focused on challenging communication situations – recognisable even by their very nature, even after she closed her laptop. She found herself revisiting real-life conversations through what she had learned, assessing whether or not she handled the situation correctly.
She admits that she remained nervous until she received the result, despite fourteen years of experience in the field. Being awarded with Elite + Silver, she was “extremely happy” – finally, she could prove herself to be a soft-skills trainer officially. The second course, however, tested her in a completely different way. ‘English Language for Competitive Exam’ threw questions at her for which she had no reference, as she never had taken a competitive exam herself. Having prepared for it largely on her own, she earned an Elite certification, though not a Silver one.
Beyond taking the course herself, Pallavi also took on the role of a mentor for English Language for Competitive Exams. Helping others understand the material also pushed her to engage more deeply with the course content. She found mentoring to be another rewarding part of her NPTEL journey.
Now, she tells anyone considering NPTEL the same thing: the cost of the exam is less than an afternoon of shopping, and what it gives in return is a credential backed by the IITs themselves. Pallavi emphasises on the sheer range on the platform – introductory courses sitting beside advanced ones, with room to move between them as confidence builds.
Looking back, Pallavi admits her future had felt oddly uncertain for a long stretch, not because she doubted her ability, but because she had no way to put it into words that anyone outside the room could verify. “It gave me a kick,” she says of that first course. “Now this is something interesting.”
~written by Sania K J