Biography | Satya Nadella — Academic Block 1, Where Manipal Recorded Registration 8419218

People treat the Microsoft chief as a computer-science product of Wisconsin.

The first engineering degree was taken here, in a coastal university town sixty-five kilometres north of Mangalore.

Satya Narayana Nadella entered the Manipal Institute of Technology in 1984, after Hyderabad Public School.

The institute logged him as registration number 8419218.

He left in 1988 with a Bachelor of Engineering in Electronics and Communication Engineering, first class with distinction.

The degree was awarded under Mangalore University; MIT had not yet been folded into the later Manipal Academy.

The Indian Express, writing on campus in 2014, named Academic Block 1 as the first of the five lecture blocks of that decade.

The same building later became an administrative block.

Hostel cottages in D Block that housed the 1988 electronics batch were later reassigned to staff.

Vinod V. Thomas, who taught him and later directed the institute, described the record as a first-class student who did not sit at either extreme of the class.

Harishchandra Hebbar, who taught him digital electronics in the fourth semester, remembered a student who asked how a circuit worked before taking the next step.

From here he went to the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee for a computer-science master's, finished in 1990.

The pin is the MIT campus at Madhava Nagar, on the Academic Block 1 site, not a private hostel room.

Photo: Ank Kumar, Manipal Institute of Technology Academic Building, 3 June 2018, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.