Me In Next Five Years? (Written in 10th Grade, and How It Came True)

"The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams." — Eleanor Roosevelt

Part 1: The Original School Essay (May 9, 2021)

Below is the exact, unedited text I wrote and published on Blogger on May 9, 2021, as a high school student sitting in my bedroom during the pandemic, trying to imagine who I would be in five years.

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Today while writing this, I thought for the first time what I will be doing in the next five years of my life.

I believe that these will be some of the most important years of my life. In these years, I will be working toward becoming a space researcher with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). I have had an interest in astronomy since my childhood. It is very fascinating to know about something that is far beyond our sight. While learning about the solar system in school I got interested in finding out more about space.

I always had a curiosity for the twinkling stars and the attractive moon in the night sky. I used to ask myself: "How far are these stars and planets? Why do we send satellites to these planets? Is time travel possible?"

The launch of Chandrayaan-2 flooded the news and social media in early July 2019. Despite the crash landing of the Chandrayaan-2 lander on the moon, the related live coverage on television evoked my curiosity in Space Research. I started reading to know more about the field. On reading, I understood that humans had explored space to a large extent. The books Hyperspace and Physics of the Impossible by Michio Kaku discuss research on black holes and wormholes. There is still much more to be explored in these areas that I wish to be a part of these unexplored research areas in 5 years.

Apart from black holes and wormholes, a few of my other interests in space research are in higher dimensions, space stations, and satellites. Higher dimensions started to become interesting when I started to read the book Flatland by Edwin Abbott, where he talks about life if life on earth were 2-dimensional.

The International Space Station functions as a home to all crews/astronauts from all over the world. The ISS improves knowledge about the effects of long-term space exposure on the human body. Various satellites are sent to planets in order to research the unknowns about them. Chandrayaan-2 was sent to the moon to search for water and also do research on the dark side of the moon. Satellite Mangalyaan was sent by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) to check if Mars can be a second home to humans. Mangalyaan discovered that dust storms on Mars can rise up to hundreds of kilometres, and it learnt about the surface properties of Mars.

All these interesting findings with innovative technologies motivate me to learn more about space and research, to dedicate my next 5 years to learning about space technology and making that my career goal.

Will I keep the enthusiasm I have now and make this dedication happen and possible? I am not sure. At the moment, I am very much excited about all these and hope to continue reading and doing whatever possible.

— Arnav Angarkar (May 9, 2021)

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Part 2: The Retrospective (Looking Back from 2026)

Re-reading this post five years later gives me chills.

When I wrote those words in May 2021, I was just a school kid fascinated by physics popularizers like Michio Kaku, staring at the moon and wondering whether I'd have the stamina to keep that curiosity alive through the grinder of board exams and entrance tests.

At the time, "working with ISRO" seemed like a distant, almost mythical dream.

Fast forward to 2025: as a student at IIIT Dharwad, I led our robotics team through months of grueling testing, computer vision modeling, and autonomous navigation for the ISRO IROC (ISRO Robotics Challenge / Space Robotics Competition). We competed against the best teams across India at the ISRO URSC facility in Bengaluru, testing our autonomous UAV and rover systems on simulated planetary terrain.

When the final results were announced, our team secured All India Rank 3 (AIR 3). Standing in the ISRO facilities, presenting our telemetry and autonomous navigation architecture to senior ISRO scientists, I thought back to that school kid who sat at his desk in May 2021 wondering: "Will I keep the enthusiasm I have now?"

The path was nothing like what I imagined. It wasn't clean or linear. There were injuries, failed exams, broken hardware, and countless moments of self-doubt. But the central spark—that genuine, child-like wonder about how things work in the universe—is still intact. If you protect that curiosity, it finds a way to carry you where you need to go.