An Education in Love and Engineering

Wedding Bells Will Soon Be Ringing for Tandon Grad Students

Kritika Chawla and Aditya Krishan Kaushik

Kritika Chawla and Aditya Krishan Kaushik each attended Amity University in Noida, a city in the Northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, but while both were interested in STEM, they took totally different paths: she earned an undergraduate degree in biotechnology and he focused on IT.

When they, coincidentally, ended up working on the same project at global professional services company Accenture, in 2013, they did not think of forming a relationship. Kritika assumed that her parents would have major input into whom she would date and ultimately marry, taking much of the pressure of the process off of her.

Even when they both landed at NYU Tandon to earn master’s degrees in Management of Technology, love was not yet in the air. Somehow, that changed once they had settled into their studies and both had found work-study positions in the Office of Graduate Admissions.

The graduate-admissions staff would probably like to take some credit for the blossoming relationship, but it had, in actuality, been the result of Kritika and Aditya’s dawning realization that they had much in common, complementary goals, and a good chance to build a fulfilling life together.

Aditya proposed on September 4, 2017, and the couple is planning to marry early next year. “Weddings in India take many hours and have many ceremonial parts,” he explained. “Our parents all approve and are helping with the planning luckily.”

After the nuptials, the two will return to the jobs they accepted after receiving their master’s degrees — hers at IBM in Connecticut and his at Cintra in New York. Hopefully, they’ll make time to come back to campus, where it all began, to visit and say hello to the would-be cupids in graduate admissions.