Coming soon
Luminary Steps
Career discovery for Indian students in grades 6–12. An assessment that takes a student's interests, aptitudes and personality seriously — and turns them into something they can actually act on.
Why I'm building it
I've spent a lot of time sitting with students who were about to choose their subjects for class 11 — the decision that quietly narrows or widens everything that comes after it.
What bothered me was how those decisions were getting made. One student picks maths because their closest friends are picking maths. Another because changing subjects would mean changing schools, and they don't want to leave. Plenty because their parents had already decided, and the conversation was over before it began.
None of these are stupid reasons. They're human ones. Wanting to stay near your friends at sixteen isn't a character flaw. But they're reasons that have nothing to do with the student — with what they're good at, what holds their attention, or what they'd still want to be doing at thirty.
What I almost never met was a student with real clarity about what came next. Not certainty — clarity. Some sense of why this path and not another. That absence is the problem I'm building for.
Starting with the students
Before any of this became a product, it was counselling and mentoring — and a lot of unstructured conversation. Not to collect data, but to understand how students actually think. What they're afraid of. Who they listen to. What they believe a career even is.
Most career guidance in India is built on assumptions about teenagers rather than conversations with them. I wanted to start from the other end, and keep starting there. Every part of Luminary Steps traces back to something a student said.
Who's building it
Luminary Steps isn't a solo project. It's being built by a deliberately mismatched group of people:
Gen Z builders
close enough to the problem to still remember it
Fellow IIT Bombay alumni
who know what the other side of the decision looks like
Psychologists
who keep the assessment methodologically honest
Engineers
from some of the country's best product teams
Counsellors
who work with teenagers every week
Educationists
who've spent entire careers inside classrooms
Career guidance goes wrong when it's designed by adults who have forgotten what sixteen felt like. This team hasn't.
Want to know when it launches?
If you run a school, work with students, or are building something adjacent — I'd like to hear from you. The more conversations this thing is built on, the better it gets.
Get in touch