Studying at 4:30 am: how a 45-year-old matched her son’s IIT Madras pace

Jigisha Tailor’s day during her IIT Madras coursework began around 4:30 am, with studying finished by seven, followed by household chores and further coursework through the early afternoon. It was the routine that let a 45-year-old former electronics teacher, away from formal study for years, keep pace with a demanding online degree programme.

Jigisha had taught electronics at an engineering college in Bharuch, Gujarat, for 16 years before family responsibilities pulled her out of the classroom in 2019. Three years later, her son Aditya Kapadia introduced her to the course that would bring her back: IIT Madras’s online Bachelor of Science in Data Science and Applications, which he had enrolled in during 2021 at age 18, after the pandemic shut down campuses across the country.

She enrolled toward the end of 2022, needing time first to relearn mathematics and statistics before the material became manageable again. She leaned on the institute’s live doubt-clearing sessions, some running past midnight, and a WhatsApp group formed by her batchmates, keeping her course load to one or two subjects a semester against Aditya’s four.

The decision was not universally understood — extended family members questioned why she was studying again at this stage of life. At home, though, her husband, also a college professor, backed her through difficult stretches, her father-in-law tracked her project deadlines, and her mother-in-law, who uses a wheelchair, stayed involved in her progress as well.

Over the course of the programme, the relationship between mother and son shifted from parent and child helping one another to something closer to peers, with both chasing the ‘S’ grade, the programme’s top distinction reserved for the highest 5 to 10 percent of students. Aditya, having cleared his own coursework earlier, guided her through later stages, including viva examinations and online proctored exams.

Aditya completed his degree in 2024 and moved into a full-time role at Syngenta after interning there. Jigisha finished around the same time but chose to pause before job-hunting, with her younger son currently in Class 12. The pair’s joint appearance at the convocation stage was arranged only after a batchmate mentioned their shared story at a pre-convocation dinner — they had not even sat together during the ceremony itself, since BS and diploma students were seated separately.

Wikimedia Commons/by Tester051005