I Studied Humanity. And I Found My Future.

The Choice Everyone Questioned — and I Have Never Regretted

When I told people I was joining the BA (Hons.) Psychology programme at Vivekananda Global University, the responses were predictable. 'What will you do with a BA?' 'Isn't arts just for people who couldn't get into engineering?' 'You should do BBA at least — more practical.' I heard some version of this from relatives, well-meaning neighbours, and exactly one careers counsellor who I suspect had not updated his thinking since 2005.

I chose Jaipur. I chose VGU. I chose Psychology as my major — and three years later, I am about to graduate with a Minor in Digital Marketing, a functional working knowledge of French, a research paper that was presented at Sodh Prayas before 218 external evaluators, three internship stints across counselling, content strategy, and a civic-tech startup, and a placement offer from a behavioural research firm. I also have theatre credits, an NSS national award, a Panache S-16 debate championship medal, and a Transdisciplinary Project team whose legal tech product was shortlisted by ACIC-VGU's incubation programme.

None of that appeared in the brochure I read in 2023. All of it happened because VGU's NEP 2020 framework meant I was never just 'a Psychology student.' I was a learner with a major, a minor, a language, a research identity, a creative practice, and a community — simultaneously, from Day One.

This is that story. Not a marketing document. A student's honest account.

❝  BA at VGU is not the degree your relatives warned you about. It is a liberal arts education with transdisciplinary architecture, research infrastructure, startup connectivity, and an industry placement ecosystem — all under one NAAC A+ roof.  ❞

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Aarambh: The Day a University Told Me Exactly What It Believed

Aarambh — VGU's annual orientation for incoming students — was the first sign that this institution was different from what I had expected. Not because of the infrastructure, though the 33-acre campus at Jagatpura is genuinely impressive. Because of what was said out loud, clearly and early, about what the university believed education should do.

The Dean of FHSS, Dr. Boola Choudhary, said something that I wrote down verbatim: 'Rajasthan is not just where we are located. It is our living public policy classroom.' That sentence told me that my education would not be abstract. It would be placed — in a state with active governance challenges, rural development stories, water scarcity policies, and a heritage sector that is both an economic resource and a cultural responsibility.

A faculty member from the Research & Development Cell walked us through the Transdisciplinary Project — the mandatory Year 1 team assignment that would put Psychology students alongside Architecture, Engineering, and Law students on a single real-world problem. An ACIC-VGU founder-in-residence described what had happened when her final-year project on rural mental health access became the foundation of a registered social enterprise. A senior NSS student explained how her NSS fieldwork in a village near Jaipur had become a qualitative data chapter in her BA dissertation.

I walked out of Aarambh understanding that 'what will you do with a BA?' had a very specific and very serious answer at this university.

❝  Aarambh showed me that the right question was never 'what will you do with a BA?' The right question was 'what will you build with it?' VGU's answer, it turned out, was remarkably ambitious.  ❞

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NEP 2020 at VGU: Not a Policy — an Architecture of Freedom

Let me explain what NEP 2020 actually means in practice at VGU, because I think most students hear about it as a university compliance feature and not as the thing that fundamentally changes what their degree is.

At VGU, NEP 2020 manifests as a 4-Year Undergraduate Programme (FYUGP) with multiple entry-exit options: Certificate after Year 1, Diploma after Year 2, Degree after Year 3, Honours after Year 4. Combined with the Academic Bank of Credits (ABC) — which digitally stores every credit you earn — this means your academic progress is yours to keep, regardless of interruptions. A classmate who paused in Semester 4 for a family emergency banked her credits, returned in Semester 5, and is graduating with our batch. That is not a policy footnote. That is a structural commitment to student realities.

But the most powerful NEP 2020 feature at VGU is what the university calls 'Design Your Own Degree.' BA students at FHSS can choose from 10+ major disciplines — Psychology, Economics, Public Policy & Development, English, History, Geography, Political Science, International Relations, and more. They can pair any of these with a Minor from 10 domains, take open electives from Architecture, Law, Design (CODE), Hotel Management, Agriculture, Journalism, and Engineering, and build a certification portfolio from Coursera, LinkedIn Learning, Harvard Business Publishing, and NPTEL/SWAYAM. The degree you graduate with is genuinely shaped by the choices you made — not by a committee decision from ten years ago.

The Combination That Changed Everything for Me

My degree architecture: Major in Psychology + Minor in Digital Marketing + AEC in French Language + VAC in Theatre + SEC in Research Methods & Data Analysis + open elective in UX Design (from CODE) + open elective in Consumer Protection Law (from VGU Law Faculty). This combination — which no standard BA syllabus anywhere would offer — made me simultaneously a behavioural analyst, a digital communicator, a basic French speaker, a practised performer, a qualitative researcher, and someone who understood design and legal protection of users.

That is not a CV trick. It is the actual shape of how I think. And it made me capable of working in a mental health tech startup because I understood the user (Psychology), the communication channel (Digital Marketing), the product interface intuition (UX Design elective), and the ethical-legal framework (Consumer Protection Law elective). All simultaneously.

◆  VGU FHSS BA programmes: Psychology, Economics, Public Policy & Development, English, History, Geography, Political Science, International Relations — 3-year and 4-year Hons. pathways

◆  NEP 2020 FYUGP: Certificate (Yr1), Diploma (Yr2), Degree (Yr3), Hons. (Yr4) | Academic Bank of Credits (ABC) — digital credit banking across institutions

◆  100+ combinations of majors, minors, electives, and certifications available to BA students at VGU

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Majoring in Psychology at FHSS: What 'Studying People' Actually Means

I want to spend time on the substance of the BA (Hons.) Psychology programme at VGU, because I think psychology is consistently misunderstood as a 'soft' subject — one that produces people who listen well and perhaps counsel others, but don't contribute to the hard measurable outcomes that industry, policy, and research value.

That misunderstanding is expensive. Behavioural economics is reshaping how governments design public policy. Cognitive psychology is informing AI interface design. Organisational psychology is transforming HR and management. Consumer psychology is the foundation of every successful brand strategy. Clinical psychology is addressing India's massive, chronically underserved mental health burden. Forensic psychology is a growing field in law enforcement and judicial support. Community psychology is the theoretical engine behind rural development and welfare programme design.

The BA (Hons.) Psychology curriculum at VGU covers developmental psychology, social psychology, abnormal psychology, research methods, statistics for psychology, cognitive science, organisational behaviour, positive psychology, counselling foundations, and psychological assessment. It is rigorous, evidence-based, and directly connected — through FHSS's collaboration with NGOs, government bodies, and development organisations — to the real populations these frameworks are built to serve.

The Research in Psychology — Sodh Prayas and What It Demands

In Semester 5, I began my research paper on digital media consumption patterns and adolescent self-esteem among urban Jaipur teenagers. This was not an assigned topic — it was a question I had been sitting with since an NSS mental health awareness camp in Semester 2, where I had watched teenagers describe their relationship with Instagram in terms that the clinical literature on attachment and comparison anxiety described precisely.

My paper was accepted for Sodh Prayas 2026. That meant presenting before 218 external evaluators from universities, industries, and research organisations across India, over three days from 8 AM to 9 PM, in a research festival that involved 12,386 student and 610 faculty participants. The external evaluator who reviewed my paper asked a question I had not anticipated: 'Your methodology is strong, but your intervention framework is weak. What would you actually recommend?' That question — unflinching, uncoddled — was the most valuable academic moment of my three years. I had never been asked to go beyond the finding to the solution. The revision I produced in response was the best thinking I have done at VGU.

Sodh Prayas 2026 also distributed ₹20 lakh in student awards across presentation categories, and ₹32 lakh in research incentives to faculty — signal of an institution that treats research as a performance-linked commitment, not a decorative activity. The R&D Cell at VGU maintains 2,853 Scopus-indexed publications and 396 published patents, and every undergraduate student participates in the research culture that produces those numbers.

◆  Sodh Prayas 2026: 12,386 student participants | 610 faculty | 218 external jury members | 3 days | 8 AM–9 PM

◆  ₹20 lakh student research awards + ₹32 lakh faculty research incentives distributed at Sodh Prayas 2026

◆  VGU R&D Cell: 2,853 Scopus-indexed publications | 396 published patents | ₹1.86 crore faculty seed fund | 134 UGC/CSIR-funded scholars

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Economics, Public Policy, and the Courses That Made Me a Policy Thinker

Because of FHSS's interdisciplinary design, my Psychology major never existed in isolation. In Semester 2, I took an open elective in Introduction to Development Economics from the Economics department. In Semester 3, I attended a Union Budget Panel Discussion organised by the Economics and Public Policy departments, featuring senior economic journalist Puja Mehra (Delhi), experts from NIPFP, CUTS International, and Madras School of Economics.

These were not events I attended because they were mandatory. I attended them because the Public Policy & Development programme at FHSS had made it structurally normal for Psychology students to be in the same room as Economics and Policy students, discussing real policy questions about welfare design, gender equity, water governance, and rural migration. The FHSS framework explicitly refuses to let disciplines exist in silos.

Rajasthan as a policy classroom is not a metaphor at VGU. FHSS students have conducted fieldwork with rural communities facing water scarcity challenges. Public Policy students have worked alongside NGO partners in Rajasthan's tribal belts. Development Studies students have mapped internal migration patterns in peri-urban Jaipur. Psychology students have contributed to mental health and community resilience research in rural settings that have no private clinical infrastructure. This is what the Associate Dean means when she says: 'The most consequential careers of this generation belong to those who master people, power, and complex systems — not just markets and machines.'

The Anubhuti 4.0 International Conference: Where Research Meets Global Dialogue

ANUBHUTI 4.0 — FHSS's flagship International Conference on Indian Knowledge Systems — brought together 25+ international scholars and 187 research presentations in a single event. Eminent contributors included Dr. Pravina Rodrigues from Star King College, California; Mr. Raghav Krishna from the Brhat Foundation; Dr. Nagaraj Paturi from INDICA; and scholars from BHU Varanasi and IISER Pune. BA students presented papers alongside doctoral scholars and international faculty. That kind of academic exposure — presenting your thinking to a global audience, receiving feedback from a researcher from California and a scholar from BHU in the same sitting — is not what most BA programmes offer their students.

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AEC, VAC, SEC: The Course Baskets That Made Me More Than My Major

The AEC-VAC-SEC structure is the part of NEP 2020 at VGU that most students underestimate at the beginning and are most grateful for by the end. Let me explain each one honestly.

AEC — Ability Enhancement Courses: French, Language, and the Global Dimension

I chose French as my AEC language course. My reason was part practical, part intellectual. The practical reason: French is the second most widely spoken language in Africa — a continent where India's diplomatic and commercial engagement is growing significantly. For someone interested in international psychology, development studies, or global NGO work, French literacy is a genuine professional asset that almost no competitor will have.

The intellectual reason: studying French restructured how I read language itself. French grammar places emotional and tonal weight differently from English and Hindi. Learning to construct meaning in a new grammatical architecture made me a sharper analyst of communication — which, as a Psychology student interested in how language shapes cognition and self-perception, was not an incidental benefit. It was the curriculum.

German is also available as an AEC option at VGU, alongside Spanish, regional Indian languages, and enhanced English communication tracks. The Environmental Science and Sustainable Development AEC course — which every student completes — gave me the ecological literacy that I later used in a FHSS fieldwork project on community water governance. In 2026, no professional in any sector can be ecologically illiterate and remain credible.

VAC — Value Added Courses: Theatre, Ethics, and the Indian Knowledge Systems That Changed How I Think

I chose Theatre as my VAC in Semester 2. Let me be precise about what that choice produced, because 'theatre improves confidence' is a true but insufficient description of what actually happens.

Theatre training at VGU — voice projection, physical presence, script analysis, ensemble rehearsal, public performance — produced a change in how I inhabit a professional space. By the end of the module, I was not performing confidence; I was structuring it. I understood how breath, pace, pause, and stance communicate authority, warmth, or urgency to an audience. I used those tools in every focus group I ran during my internship, every placement interview, and every public presentation at Sodh Prayas. The Theatre VAC was the most applied course I took.

The Indian Knowledge Systems VAC was the most intellectually surprising. I had assumed — incorrectly — that it would be a survey of ancient texts with limited contemporary application. What I encountered was a rigorous examination of Arthashastra-based policy frameworks, indigenous ecological management traditions, Vedic mathematics and its relationship to algorithmic thinking, Indian philosophical approaches to ethics and collective welfare, and the relationship between IKS and contemporary governance challenges. For a Psychology student, the IKS frameworks for community mental health, collective resilience, and the psychology of dharma and karma as motivational architectures were genuinely novel and professionally applicable.

My IKS VAC directly informed a section of my Sodh Prayas paper on indigenous psychological frameworks and their relevance to community mental health design in rural India. It was cited by the external evaluator as the most original contribution in the paper. A course that I almost treated as a compliance requirement became the most-cited section of my research.

The ANUBHUTI 4.0 conference — FHSS's flagship IKS international conference — deepened this further. Hearing Dr. Nagaraj Paturi from INDICA speak about the relationship between classical Indian discourse traditions and modern interdisciplinary research methods was the moment I understood that Indian Knowledge Systems are not historical artefacts. They are living, applicable intellectual frameworks that modern education has systematically undervalued.

SEC — Skill Enhancement Courses: Research Methods, Data, and the Digital Tools that Made Me Employable

My SEC sequence was chosen to build a skills stack that would make a Psychology BA graduate competitive in roles that typically go to BBA or B.Sc. graduates. Semester 1: Communication Technology SEC, which covered professional writing, presentation design, and digital communication tools. Semester 3: Research Methods & Qualitative Data Analysis SEC, which introduced SPSS basics, NVivo for qualitative coding, and academic research design. Semester 5: Digital Tools for Social Science SEC, covering Google Analytics, social media data analysis, and introductory R for statistical visualisation.

These three SECs, combined with my Minor in Digital Marketing and my Coursera certifications, made me the only Psychology student in my placement cohort who could run a survey, code the responses qualitatively, visualise the quantitative outputs, and present them as a digital marketing insight brief. That combination — human behaviour expertise + research rigour + digital analytics fluency — is not easy to find in the market. I built it, deliberately, over three years.

What AEC/VAC/SEC Built — Summary:

▸  AEC:  French language literacy — applicable to global roles in diplomacy, development, cultural institutions, and Francophone markets

▸  AEC:  Environmental Science literacy — ecological intelligence for every professional context in 2026

▸  VAC:  Theatre and performing arts — physical confidence, vocal authority, ensemble collaboration, public presence

▸  VAC:  Indian Knowledge Systems — civilisational intellectual frameworks with direct applications in policy, psychology, and social design

▸  VAC:  Ethics reasoning — the ability to navigate moral complexity in professional and civic contexts

▸  SEC:  Research methods and data analysis — the technical spine of a credible social science career

▸  SEC:  Digital tools fluency — Analytics, SPSS, NVivo, social data — making the social scientist immediately applicable in digital environments

VGU's AEC, VAC, SEC basket: foreign languages (French, German, Spanish), performing arts, Indian Knowledge Systems, sustainability, ethics, digital tools, entrepreneurship, research methods — all credit-bearing, all NEP 2020 integrated.

❝  AEC gave me French and ecological literacy. VAC gave me theatre confidence and IKS depth. SEC gave me the data tools to make my psychology knowledge legible to employers who hire in Excel. Together they built a professional no single department could have produced.  ❞

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My Minor in Digital Marketing: The Second Identity That Won Me the Placement

The Minor Degree is the single most strategically important decision a BA student at VGU makes, and it is the one most students make too late. I chose Digital Marketing as my Minor in Semester 1 — before I fully understood why — and the decision compounded over three years into the differentiating feature of my placement profile.

VGU offers 10 Minor Degree areas: Design, Indian Knowledge Systems, Economics, Psychology, Performing Arts, Sustainable Development, Environmental Science, Sports, Social & Community Engagement, and Entrepreneurship. A BA Psychology student can Minor in any of these. I chose Digital Marketing — available as both a Minor and through the wider elective framework — because I had observed something that most people in the mental health and social sector were slow to understand: the reach of a psychology-informed communication campaign is determined entirely by the quality of its digital strategy. A mental health awareness programme that doesn't understand social media algorithms, content architecture, and audience segmentation will reach fewer people than the misinformation it is trying to counter.

The Digital Marketing Minor gave me SEO fundamentals, social media content strategy, email marketing design, paid media basics, analytics interpretation, and brand communication architecture. Combined with my Google Digital Unlocked certification (Coursera) and my LinkedIn Learning modules in content strategy and data storytelling, I built a complete digital communications competency that sits alongside my Psychology major as a second professional identity, not a supplementary skill.

How the Minor Showed Up in the Real World

My second internship — at a mental health content platform in Jaipur — was found because the hiring manager read my LinkedIn profile and saw a psychology undergraduate with a digital marketing minor and a Google certification. She told me later: 'We usually hire marketing graduates for this role. But someone who understands the psychology of the content and the mechanics of its distribution is exactly who we actually need.' That is the Minor at work.

In my final placement interview, the hiring panel asked me to propose a social media strategy for a behavioural health awareness campaign targeting urban youth. My answer drew simultaneously on psychological vulnerability theory, audience segmentation principles from the Digital Marketing Minor, platform-specific content architecture I had learned from SEC courses, and a case study I had analysed in a Harvard Business Publishing module. The interviewer said: 'This is the most integrated answer we've heard today.' It was integrated because three years of deliberate degree design had made integration my natural mode of thinking.

The 10 Minor Degrees for BA Students — Choosing Intentionally

Every BA student at VGU needs to make this choice consciously. Here is my honest assessment of each Minor from the perspective of a humanities student:

▸  Digital Marketing:  The most powerful differentiator for BA students entering digital industries, marketing, content, communications, startups, and NGO outreach. Changes how you think about reach, message, and impact.

▸  Design:  Transforms BA graduates into creative practitioners. Visual communication, design thinking, UX logic, and product narrative. Directly applicable to content design, brand strategy, cultural industries, and communication design roles.

▸  Indian Knowledge Systems:  Arthashastra strategy, indigenous ecological frameworks, Vedic mathematics, and civilisational governance ethics. Critical for civil services, policy, consultancy, cultural sectors, and any professional context engaging with India's pluralistic heritage.

▸  Economics:  Adds econometric depth, financial economics, and policy analysis tools to any BA major. Strongly recommended for Psychology students targeting behavioural economics, Economics students targeting consulting or banking, or Policy students targeting think tanks.

▸  Performing Arts:  Builds the physical-vocal-spatial intelligence that no presentation module can fully develop. Essential for anyone in leadership, client-facing, public communication, performance, or media roles.

▸  Sustainable Development:  ESG framework fluency, circular economy thinking, carbon literacy, and sustainable enterprise design. Among the fastest-growing professional categories in India in 2026. Critical for anyone in development, policy, corporate, or consulting roles.

▸  Sports:  Sports management, sports analytics, sports marketing, and event management. Applicable to India's booming sports industry (BCCI, ISL, franchises, wellness brands, sports technology).

▸  Environmental Science:  Microeconomics, public finance, development economics, and environmental economics. Best for Geography, History, and Public Policy students with policy or research aspirations.

▸  Social & Community Engagement:  Community development, social enterprise, CSR strategy, NGO management, and participatory research. Directly applicable for Psychology and Public Policy graduates entering the social sector.

▸  Entrepreneurship:  Startup design, business model validation, early-stage financial modelling, and ecosystem navigation. Essential for any BA student who intends to build something — in any sector.

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The Transdisciplinary Project: The Education That Cannot Be Summarised in a Grade

The TDP is mandatory from Year 1 at VGU. Teams of five students from different disciplines — assembled by the R&D Cell under Dr. V. Sairam, TDP Officer — co-create solutions on real-world themes and present to external evaluators. My first TDP team: one B.Tech (CSE) student, one BBA student, one LLB student, one BCA student, and me — BA Psychology. Our theme: rural mental health access in Rajasthan.

Our first three meetings were difficult in exactly the right way. The B.Tech student wanted to prototype an app within the first week. The LLB student raised the legal liability of digital mental health tools. The BBA student wanted a revenue model before we had a use case. The BCA student was designing a database before we had users. And I — the Psychology student — spent two weeks trying to explain that you cannot design a mental health tool without first understanding the population's cultural relationship to help-seeking, which in rural Rajasthan is shaped by stigma, community hierarchy, and gender roles that do not appear in any app requirement specification.

The external evaluator at year-end said: 'The psychological and social design layer is the strongest part of this project. It is the reason the technical solution will actually work for real people rather than the imagined user.'

Second-year TDP theme: digital documentation and protection of Rajasthani intangible cultural heritage. My role: psychologically-informed community engagement framework — understanding why artisan communities engage or disengage with documentation processes, and designing an intervention that respects their agency. The B.Arch student from CODE brought spatial and aesthetic knowledge. The Journalism student understood archival systems. The BBA student designed the sustainability model. Together, we produced a report that the FHSS department submitted to a state-level cultural heritage programme.

Third-Year TDP: From Campus to the ACIC Pipeline

Final year TDP: a community mental health micro-enterprise model for tier-3 towns in Rajasthan. Our team's business plan was reviewed by the ACIC-VGU Foundation's incubation team — the same institution that has supported 212+ startups. Two team members were invited to develop it further through the incubation programme. Not because we had a perfect product. Because we had asked the right questions with the right rigour.

◆  TDP: Mandatory Year 1 onwards | Teams of 5 cross-disciplinary students | Evaluated by external experts | Overseen by TDP Officer Dr. V. Sairam, R&D Cell, VGU

◆  ACIC-VGU: India's first Atal Community Innovation Centre in a private university | 212+ startups incubated | NITI Aayog & AIM supported

❝  The TDP taught me that the problems worth solving are never owned by one discipline. They are only solved when the psychologist, the engineer, the lawyer, the designer, and the entrepreneur stop competing for the best explanation and start building the best solution.  ❞

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Music, Dance, Theatre: The Creative Education No One Told Me I Was Signing Up For

This is the section where I want to speak most personally, because it covers the part of my VGU experience that surprised me most — and that I am most grateful for.

I came to VGU as a student who would have described herself, on Day 1, as thoroughly non-artistic. I had not performed publicly since a school play at age twelve. I had never studied music formally. My relationship with dance was limited to weddings where I had done both too much and too little simultaneously.

VGU changed that — not by making me an artist, but by making me understand what creative practice actually does to a person's professional and intellectual capacity.

Theatre as a VAC — What Happened to My Body and Voice in One Semester

The Theatre VAC was eight weeks. Week one: breathwork and voice projection — learning that the voice is a physical instrument, not just a channel for thought. Week two: stage presence — understanding how body position, eye contact, and spatial relationship to audience communicate before any word is spoken. Week three onwards: script analysis, character construction, ensemble rehearsal, and ultimately — performance.

The performance was in front of the faculty, a visiting theatre practitioner, and other students. I played a community health worker navigating a conversation with a resistant elderly patient — a scenario I had constructed from my NSS fieldwork experience. The theatre trainer asked me after: 'How did you build that silence before the last line? It carried the whole scene.' I had not consciously constructed it. My body had, from eight weeks of training. That is what creative practice deposits in you — not technique, but physical intelligence.

VGU's campus hosts 168 events per year — electrifying performances, live concerts, cultural festivals. Music, dance, and theatre are not peripheral campus life features. They are formal curriculum elements (through the Performing Arts Minor and VAC) and central to the Panache festival ecosystem. Music is available as a Minor Degree at VGU, with structured curriculum in both classical and contemporary traditions. Students who complete the Minor in Performing Arts graduate with a trained presence in music, dance, or theatre that is formally certified on their degree transcript — not an extracurricular note in a corner of the CV.

Panache S-16 — Where the Arts Become the Arena

Panache S-16, VGU's 2026 flagship festival, was the space where everything I had learned in Theatre VAC, Digital Marketing Minor, and Psychology Major converged into something I had not expected: I won the inter-college debate championship.

The winning margin was not my argument. Several participants had better-researched arguments than me. The margin was delivery. How I inhabited the three-minute rebuttal — the pause, the redirect, the final turn to the audience. Eight weeks of Theatre VAC, made external.

Panache S-16 statistics: 7,000+ unique participations, 30,000+ total footfall, 56+ colleges represented. This is not a college cultural event. It is a national-scale academic festival, and winning in it carries real professional signal.

◆  Panache S-16 (March 2026): 7,000+ unique participations | 30,000+ total footfall | 56+ colleges | National-level competitions across management, arts, sports, and technical domains

◆  VGU campus: 168 events per year including live concerts, cultural festivals, and celebrity performances | Music Minor formally available | Performing Arts Minor includes dance, theatre, and music tracks

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NCC, NSS, and Sodh Prayas: Three Pillars That Built My Civic Identity

NSS: Rajasthan as Living Laboratory

The NSS programme at VGU is not a service hours checkbox. It is a structured community engagement curriculum with year-round projects: health camps, literacy drives, environmental initiatives, water conservation outreach, rural women's empowerment workshops, and urban community projects across Jaipur.

My NSS involvement began in Semester 1 with a mental health awareness camp in a village outside Jagatpura. What I encountered — the cultural relationship to psychological distress, the role of community elders in mediating help-seeking, the complete absence of any formal mental health infrastructure, and the simultaneous presence of deeply sophisticated indigenous emotional support networks — became the empirical foundation of my Semester 5 research paper. NSS was not service learning. It was primary research. It was the best fieldwork I could have designed, and the NSS framework built it for me.

One of my FHSS seniors received the NSS National Award — one of India's highest recognitions for student community service — while at VGU. Another completed fieldwork that became a chapter in her Sodh Prayas paper. This is what happens when community engagement is integrated into academic identity rather than treated as an extracurricular.

NCC: Discipline as a Cognitive Practice, Not Just a Physical One

VGU's NCC Company offers structured training towards NCC A, B, and C certificates. For BA students — whose career aspirations frequently include UPSC, State PCS, banking, NGO leadership, and public sector roles — NCC certification carries real weight in competitive processes. The training demanded accountability standards that no course could produce: 75% minimum attendance, absolute punctuality, physical discipline, and the experience of working within a collective command structure.

I took NCC in Year 2. The most important thing it did was not the certificate. It was the morning it required me to show up on a day I had decided, privately, to skip. Showing up anyway — because the collective depended on it, because absence had a real cost, because discipline is a practice and not a feeling — is the habit that distinguishes professionals from people who mean well.

The highest-performing VGU NCC students have represented the university at national-level events. For any BA student considering civil services, defence, or public administration careers, NCC is not an optional enhancement. It is direct preparation.

Sodh Prayas: The Event That Made Me a Researcher Rather Than a Student

Sodh Prayas 2026 was three days, 8 AM to 9 PM, 12,386 student presenters, 218 external jury members, and one experience I cannot describe in any other terms than: the first time I felt like my work had a place in the world.

That phrase — 'for the first time, I felt like my work had a place in the world' — was said by a PhD scholar named Ram at Sodh Prayas 2026. I understand it precisely, because I felt something similar when an external evaluator from a development research institute in Delhi asked me a follow-up question about my paper's methodology. He was not being kind. He was genuinely curious. My research had produced a genuine question in an expert's mind. That is what research is supposed to do.

Sodh Prayas is the annual culmination of VGU's year-round research ecosystem. It distributed ₹20 lakh in student awards and ₹32 lakh in faculty research incentives in 2026. Two new research chairs were established at the 2026 edition: the Dr. K. Ram Chair for Rural Development Research, and the CA Anil Bafna Chair for Family Business Research. New research chairs at an undergraduate conference — signalling that the university believes undergraduate inquiry matters enough to institutionalise its thematic focus.

For BA students at VGU, Sodh Prayas is not a senior student's event. First-year undergraduates present Transdisciplinary Project findings. Second-year students present early research. Third and fourth-year Honours students present dissertations. Everyone is in the same building, before the same external scrutiny, contributing to the same culture. That is how a research identity is built — not through one course, but through three years of being expected to have something worth saying.

❝  Sodh Prayas is not an event. It is a mirror. It shows you, with complete honesty, what three years of inquiry have produced — and who you are becoming as a thinker.  ❞

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The Startup Ecosystem, AI, and Why the Humanities Student Has an Edge

In May 2026, YourStory published a piece titled 'The Silicon Valley Mindset Has Found an Unlikely Home in Jaipur.' The institution featured was VGU. The observation: students were being taught to build startups, file patents, and solve local problems long before graduation — in an institution with 212+ ACIC-incubated startups and a TBI programme supporting 160+ ventures.

I want to say something that I think most students — including most BA students — don't hear clearly enough: the humanities student has a structural advantage in the startup and AI ecosystem that technical students rarely acknowledge.

Here is why. The problems that matter in 2026 — in health tech, in civic tech, in education technology, in sustainable enterprise, in cultural industries, in public policy implementation — are not primarily technical problems. They are human problems that have a technical component. Understanding the human problem — its psychological architecture, its cultural context, its historical roots, its policy constraints, its community embeddedness — is the rarest and most valuable skill in any product team, any policy design team, and any social enterprise founding team. It is the skill that Psychology, Economics, Public Policy, and Humanities students develop most deeply.

The AI integration at VGU is visible in both the curriculum and the campus culture. As AI expands across industries, liberal arts graduates are finding fresh opportunities in product, content, and ethical design roles — because AI needs human beings who understand what it should say, how it should say it, and whether it should say it at all. Humanities students who understand cognitive psychology, content strategy, and ethical reasoning are exactly the people building the human layer of AI products.

The Civic-Tech Startup Internship

My third internship — in a Jaipur-based civic technology startup working on digital grievance redressal systems for local government bodies — came through ACIC-VGU's internship network. The team needed someone who could conduct user research with municipal workers and citizens who had very different relationships to digital interfaces, government authority, and formal complaint mechanisms.

No engineer on the team had the framework for that. No business analyst had the ethnographic skills. A BA Psychology student with NSS fieldwork experience, qualitative research SEC training, UX Design open elective knowledge, and a Digital Marketing Minor who understood how communication lands differently for different audiences — that was exactly who they needed. The hiring conversation lasted twenty minutes. The offer came the next morning.

◆  ACIC-VGU: India's first Atal Community Innovation Centre in a private university | 212+ startups incubated | Supported by NITI Aayog & AIM

◆  VGU-TBI: Technology Business Incubator | 160+ ventures supported | Active mentor network | Seed funding and infrastructure

◆  YourStory (May 2026): 'The Silicon Valley mindset has found an unlikely home in Jaipur' — VGU featured for student startup and patent-building culture

❝  The most important thing AI taught me about my humanities degree: I understand what machines should say to human beings. That is not a small thing. It is the new core competency — and it belongs to students who studied people, not just systems.  ❞

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Coursera, LinkedIn Learning & the Certification Stack That Made My Profile Work

VGU's Global Learning Hub integrates eight global learning platforms: Coursera Campus (Google, IBM, Meta, Microsoft), LinkedIn Learning, Harvard Business Publishing, EXIN Certifications, AWS Academy, Red Hat Academy, NPTEL/SWAYAM, and CodeEdu. For BA students, who typically have less automatic platform access than engineering or management counterparts, this infrastructure is a meaningful equaliser.

My certification sequence across six semesters:

▸  Google Digital Marketing (Coursera):  Mapped to SEC Communication Technology — digital communication literacy made externally verifiable

▸  IBM Data Analytics Foundations (Coursera):  Aligned with Digital Marketing Minor — analytical layer to communications competence

▸  LinkedIn Learning: Content Strategy & Storytelling:  Completed before second internship — directly used in mental health content strategy role

▸  NPTEL: Sustainable Development Goals & Policy:  Completed alongside IKS VAC — positioned me for ESG and sustainability consulting conversations

▸  LinkedIn Learning: Qualitative Research Methods:  Aligned with Psychology research methods SEC — strengthened academic and corporate research credibility

▸  Harvard Business Publishing: Social Impact Strategy:  Completed final semester — positioned me for think tank, NGO, and policy research roles

◆  VGU: 17,000+ Coursera courses | 13,000+ completions/year | 20,000+ LinkedIn Learning courses | 5,000+ completions/year

◆  Platform partners: Coursera, LinkedIn Learning, Harvard Business Publishing, EXIN, AWS Academy, NPTEL/SWAYAM, Red Hat Academy, CodeEdu

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The Internships: Where Three Years of Theory Became One Year of Practice

VGU builds mandatory internships into the NEP 2020 curriculum as credit-bearing, faculty-monitored requirements. For BA students at FHSS, the internship pipeline connects to NGOs, government bodies, development organisations, corporates, media organisations, research institutes, startups, and clinical or counselling settings — a range that reflects the breadth of what humanities graduates actually do.

Internship 1: Counselling Support at an NGO

First internship: six weeks with a Jaipur-based NGO running adolescent mental health and life-skills programmes in government schools. My role — structured under the supervision of a clinical psychologist — was group session facilitation, psychometric assessment support, and documentation. I arrived with theoretical knowledge of adolescent psychology, attachment frameworks, and psychometric tools. I left understanding what it means to sit across from a sixteen-year-old in a government school in Rajasthan who has never been asked how she is feeling — and what that question does to a person who has never been asked it before.

The faculty monitoring process — fortnightly reflective logs, a mid-internship mentor conversation, and a formal internship presentation at FHSS — meant the experience was not just lived but processed. The difference between experience and learning is reflection. VGU's internship structure enforces reflection as an academic obligation.

Internship 2: Mental Health Content at a Digital Platform

Second internship: mental health content platform, Jaipur. Found through the placement cell's internship network — the result of the Digital Marketing Minor and Google certification making my profile legible to a recruiter looking for someone who combined psychological literacy with digital communication competence. Role: content strategy and audience research.

I ran three audience surveys, coded responses qualitatively using the NVivo process I had learned in SEC, and produced a content audit and twelve-week editorial strategy that the platform's founder adopted. The project became a case study in my final-year portfolio.

Internship 3: Civic-Tech Startup User Research

Third internship: civic technology startup, ACIC-VGU network, Jaipur. User research for a municipal grievance redressal digital system. As described above — ethnographic methodology, cultural sensitivity training from NSS, UX Design open elective intuition, and Digital Marketing Minor communication literacy all applied simultaneously to a real product in development.

The T&P Cell's pre-placement preparation infrastructure — resume workshops, skill assessments, aptitude preparation, mock interviews, and group discussion practice — ran parallel to these internships and made the transition from internship experience to placement conversation structurally coherent. The placement team knew what I had done. They had helped me document it, articulate it, and present it in the form that placement interviewers expect.

◆  VGU Internship Camp 2025: 100+ recruiters including Reliance, Aditya Birla Group, HDFC Bank, Muthoot Finance, Star Health, Lenskart

◆  7,000+ internship opportunities facilitated through VGU's placement ecosystem (2025–26 data)

◆  FHSS internship pipeline: NGOs, government bodies, development organisations, research institutes, startups, media, counselling and clinical settings

◆  BA average package: ₹3–5 LPA | BA highest package: ₹8 LPA (content writing, research analysis, government services track)

❝  The internship is where the degree proves itself — or reveals where it needs to be stronger. At VGU, the curriculum is designed so that what the internship reveals, the next semester can address. That is what a living educational architecture looks like.  ❞

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The Placement Drive: The Day Everything Converged

Let me describe my final placement interview accurately, because I think it illustrates what three years of the kind of education I've described actually produce when they meet the evaluation moment.

The company: a behavioural research and consultancy firm based in Delhi, interviewing on campus. The panel: a senior research director and a digital strategy lead. The process: a written case analysis, a group discussion, and a forty-five minute individual interview.

The case analysis asked me to design a research methodology for studying the psychological barriers to adopting digital financial services among rural women in Rajasthan. I produced a mixed-methods framework: quantitative survey design drawing on the SEC research methods course, qualitative FGD and ethnographic protocol drawing on NSS fieldwork experience and NVivo training, sampling strategy informed by FHSS fieldwork exposure to rural Rajasthan communities, and a communication strategy for building community trust before data collection drawing on Digital Marketing Minor and IKS VAC insights.

The group discussion tested composure under challenge and the ability to build on others' arguments. Theatre VAC. Ten mock GDs with the T&P Cell. Both deployed simultaneously.

The individual interview: forty-five minutes. The first twenty were about my research — not my grade sheet. The next fifteen were about the Digital Marketing Minor and how I would design a digital outreach campaign for a rural financial inclusion programme. The final ten were about my Theatre VAC and what creative practice had done to my professional presence. The panel was not box-ticking. They were testing whether the person described in the portfolio was the person sitting in front of them.

I got the offer. But I want to be precise about why: it was not because VGU 'placed' me. It was because three years of deliberate degree design — Major, Minor, AEC, VAC, SEC, TDP, NSS, Theatre, Sodh Prayas, internships, certifications, Panache — had built a person who was genuinely qualified for a role that required exactly what I had built. The placement drive did not create that match. It revealed it.

◆  VGU 2025–26: 1,682+ students placed | 90% placement rate | ₹54 LPA highest domestic | ₹1 Cr+ international | 367+ recruiting companies

◆  BA/Humanities career pathways: Civil Services, NGO/Development sector, Policy analyst, Research analyst, Content writer, Counsellor/Psychologist, Economist, GIS analyst, Startup team roles

◆  Top recruiters: Amazon, Paytm, Flipkart, TCS, Tech Mahindra, Axis Bank, Airtel, Google, Microsoft, Deloitte, IBM, and 360+ others

❝  The placement drive is the exam. The degree is the preparation. At VGU, three years of building the right things — and building them with genuine intention — means you arrive at the exam already qualified.  ❞

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What Three Years of BA at VGU Actually Built: An Honest Accounting

I want to end with the same honesty I started with, because honesty is the only thing that makes one student's account worth another student's time.

Studying BA at VGU was not easy in the way people assume a 'softer' degree is easy. It required me to manage five parallel learning streams simultaneously — Major, Minor, AEC/VAC/SEC, TDP, and certification — while also managing internships, NSS commitments, Sodh Prayas research, and Panache. There were semesters where I was overwhelmed. There were research papers I had to rewrite after Sodh Prayas feedback told me clearly that they weren't good enough yet. There were internships where I had to confront, repeatedly, the gap between what I thought I knew about human behaviour and what I actually understood about the specific human beings in front of me.

All of that was education. Not the comfortable parts — the difficult ones.

NEP 2020 at VGU gave me the freedom to design a degree that was genuinely mine. The AEC gave me French and ecological literacy. The VAC gave me theatre intelligence and IKS depth. The SEC gave me the research and digital tools to make my humanities knowledge legible to employers. The Minor in Digital Marketing gave me a second professional identity that made my placement profile impossible to ignore. The TDP gave me the ability to think in other people's disciplines. Sodh Prayas gave me a research identity. NSS gave me a community and a field. NCC gave me discipline I didn't know I needed. Theatre gave me presence. Music and dance on this campus gave me a relationship with creativity that I had abandoned at twelve and recovered at twenty-one.

And VGU — the institution, the campus, the ecosystem, the faculty at FHSS, the R&D Cell, the T&P Cell, the ACIC, the 33-acre campus in Jagatpura — gave me a place where all of that was structurally possible. Not easy. Possible. The difference is enormous.

For Every Student Beginning Their BA Journey at FHSS, VGU

▸  Choose your Minor early and deliberately:  Choose it by Semester 1 — not Semester 4. The Minor compounds. Let it. Digital Marketing if you're going into communications, research, or social sector outreach. Design if you want to build things people can use. IKS if you want to think at civilisational depth. Performing Arts if you want the kind of professional presence that no workshop will give you.

▸  Take AEC seriously:  French or German if you want global careers. Environmental Science AEC if you want ESG credibility. Don't treat AEC as a compliance requirement — treat it as the global and ecological dimension of your professional identity.

▸  Choose the VAC that makes you uncomfortable:  Theatre VAC is not about becoming an actor. It is about developing physical intelligence that changes how you occupy professional space. IKS VAC is not about ancient texts — it is about the deepest available frameworks for understanding Indian society, governance, and the human condition.

▸  Build your SEC sequence deliberately:  Research Methods SEC first. Then the discipline-specific digital tool. Then a Coursera certification that makes the sequence externally verifiable. Build a stack, not a list.

▸  Take the TDP seriously:  Treat it as a professional project, not an academic requirement. The cross-disciplinary team you build relationships with in Year 1 may be the founding team of something real by Year 4.

▸  Present at Sodh Prayas:  Present at Sodh Prayas in every year of your degree — not just your final year. The external feedback is the most honest and most useful thing VGU will give you. Accept it gratefully.

▸  Engage with NSS and NCC fully:  Show up for your community and your country. The fieldwork you do through NSS is primary research. The discipline you develop through NCC is professional infrastructure. Neither is optional for the kind of leader this degree is building.

▸  Approach internships with a portfolio:  Apply to the Internship Camp with a portfolio that demonstrates your thinking, not just your grades. Use every internship to close the gap between what you know and what you can do.

❝  VGU gave me the freedom to design my education, the ecosystem to make it real, and the rigour to make it mean something. A BA from this institution, built deliberately, is not a fallback degree. It is a leadership degree. The world needs the people who can think about it — not just the people who can code it.  ❞