The story of Manish Bhattacharya is perfect example of “where there is a will, there is a way”. After completing his 12th with 65% marks, he wanted money to pursue engineering, but unfortunately did not have enough money to afford it.
Manish failed to to qualify IIT-JEE and AIEEE that year, so decided to prepare for the examination once again for the next year. He couldn’t afford coaching classes, so he prepared on his own. His results turned out to be better, but was not good enough to get admission to government colleges.
Manish’s father told him that they couldn’t afford engineering and asked him to join the local college for B.Sc.
A few private colleges were willing to give him admission for his rank. So he pushed his father to somehow arrange for 25,000, the minimum for admission.
His Father whose monthly wage was only Rs. 8,000 told him that he would ask his boss to help out. The boss did agree to lend the money and with a little bit of a struggle, he was also able to also get loan as well.
Somewhere in his second semester, he learned about ‘Bug Bounty Program’, where big companies give rewards for reporting security issues on their websites. After managing to get cheap laptop, he learnt security for an year.
source: quora
After acquiring the necessary skill, he was able to find a few security flaws in Facebook and he so reported them. Manish’s luck was about to change soon. Acknowledging his report, Facebook rewarded him with a sum of $5000 (Rs. 3 lakhs Approximately).
This proved to be life changing for Manish – he became financially independent, paid of his education loan and contributed to the security of 500+ websites.
Manish says that he made his first million in college and is now ranked #62 in Google Bounty Program.
