Build Before You Figure It Out

The Decision

Aksa Rose is a second-year B.Tech student at LBS Institute of Technology for Women in Trivandrum, Kerala. She didn’t start with a grand plan. She started by being curious — about web development, about how things are built, about what she could make with code.

Instead of waiting until she felt “ready enough”, she started building. She shipped projects before she fully understood the frameworks. She contributed to open source before she felt qualified. She took on responsibilities before anyone asked her to.

What She Built

Aksa’s GitHub tells the story — 46 repositories and counting. Not all of them are polished. Not all of them are finished. But they’re proof that she builds:

• Semantic Search Engine — a Python project exploring how search can understand meaning, not just keywords.
• Chodhichoollu — a project built for her local context.
• Reinforcement Learning experiments — diving into machine learning through hands-on notebooks.
• Dozens of other projects spanning web development, frontend work, and AI exploration.

She didn’t wait for a course to teach her. She built her way into understanding.

What She Did Beyond Code

Building projects was only part of it. Aksa stepped into roles that put her at the centre of her college’s tech community:

• Saturday HackNight Coordinator at TinkerHub Foundation — organising regular hackathons and building events that give students a reason to ship.
• WIT Facilitator at TinkerHub LBSITW — leading the Women in Tech community at her college, creating space for women in engineering to collaborate, learn, and build together.

She didn’t wait to be appointed. She saw what was missing and built it.

Why This Matters

Aksa’s story is not about being exceptional. It’s about a specific decision: build before you figure it out. Start the project before you understand the full stack. Take the role before you feel ready. Ship the thing before it’s perfect.

This is what agency looks like in practice — not a personality trait, but a habit. A student in Trivandrum who decided that building was better than waiting.