Completing a formal education in a field isn't the end of learning it — in something moving as fast as AI, it's barely the start. Having my Major in Artificial Intelligence conferred at IIT Ropar by Prof. Sudarshan Iyengar, and then spending a long conversation afterwards about what the field leaves open for the future, crystallized that for me. I wrote about it in this reflection.
A completed foundation is a starting point, not a finish line
There's a temptation to treat a credential as an arrival — the learning is done, the box is checked. In a field like AI, that mindset ages badly within months. The real value of a rigorous foundation isn't that it's complete; it's that it gives you the depth to keep learning the field intelligently as it changes.
The conversation after the ceremony was, fittingly, not about what had been settled but about what the field leaves open — the unanswered parts, the direction of travel. That's the right frame for finishing any serious education: less "I now know this" and more "I'm now equipped to keep understanding this as it evolves."
What completion actually signals
- Depth enables adaptation. A formal grounding is what lets you absorb the next development in a field with judgment instead of hype — you can tell what's genuinely new from what's repackaged.
- The best practitioners stay curious. A conversation about open problems, at the moment of completion, is the healthy posture — the field's frontier matters more than its settled core.
- Learning is a permanent posture. Finishing a demanding program is best understood as building the capacity to keep going, not permission to stop.
The takeaway
Having the AI major conferred was a real milestone — but the most valuable thing I carried out of it was the orientation toward what comes next: treating a completed foundation as the platform for continuous learning in a field that will keep changing. The credential is the floor, not the ceiling.
The full account, including that conversation, is on the page below.
👉 Read it: www.divyakush.com/insights/iit-ropar-complete
Divyakush Punjabi — Full-Stack & AI Systems Engineer
🌐 https://www.divyakush.com · 💼 LinkedIn · 💻 GitHub
