She quit teaching in 2019: this year she graduated with her son

Jigisha Tailor taught electronics at an engineering college in Bharuch, Gujarat, for 16 years before family responsibilities pulled her out of the classroom in 2019. She did not expect to return to academic life in the way she eventually did — as a student, in a course her own son introduced her to.

Her son, Aditya Kapadia, had enrolled in IIT Madras’s online Bachelor of Science in Data Science and Applications in 2021, at age 18, after the Covid-19 pandemic shut down campuses nationwide. He also pursued a diploma at a college in Ahmedabad simultaneously, as online students were then required to hold in-person enrollment too, but dropped it once the IIT Madras senate ruled the online BS degree equivalent to a regular four-year course.

Jigisha enrolled in the same programme toward the end of 2022, after watching from the sidelines and being encouraged by Aditya. The coursework spanned statistics and systems, close enough to her electronics background to feel familiar, and different enough to feel new. Restarting after years away from formal study meant relearning mathematics and statistics before the material became manageable again.

She relied heavily on the institute’s live doubt-clearing sessions, some running past midnight, along with a WhatsApp group formed by her batchmates. Unlike Aditya, who often took four subjects a semester, Jigisha kept her load light at one or two, with a daily routine that began around 4:30 am and ran through study, household chores and further coursework into the early afternoon.

Extended family members questioned why she was studying again at this stage of life, but her husband, also a college professor, supported her through the difficult phases, her father-in-law tracked her project deadlines, and her mother-in-law, who uses a wheelchair, stayed involved in her progress too. As the years passed, mother and son increasingly competed for the programme’s ‘S’ grade, its highest distinction, with Aditya — who had cleared his own coursework earlier — guiding her through later stages including viva examinations and online proctored exams.

Aditya finished his degree in 2024 and went on to a full-time role at Syngenta after interning there as a data science intern. Jigisha completed her programme around the same time but paused before job-hunting, wanting to stay available while her younger son finishes Class 12. At the convocation, the two were seated separately by programme type, and their joint appearance on stage only came together after a batchmate mentioned their story at a pre-convocation dinner.

Wikimedia Commons/by Tester051005