Biography | Satya Nadella — The Engineering College on This Plateau That Issued His Electrical Degree

People treat a software career as a computer-science undergraduate story.

The first degree from this campus was in electrical engineering.

Nadella arrived at the Manipal Institute of Technology after the Hyderabad Public School class of 1984.

The college sits on a laterite plateau in Udupi district, about eight kilometres inland from the Arabian Sea and sixty-odd kilometres north of Mangalore.

T. M. A. Pai opened it in 1957 as Manipal Engineering College.

By the late 1980s it was a constituent engineering school whose degrees were awarded through Mangalore University.

That affiliation is why Microsoft's own biography still lists the bachelor's as a Mangalore University electrical-engineering degree.

The work was done here, in the laboratories and lecture rooms of MIT.

He finished in 1988.

Classmates later told Indian papers that the boy from Hyderabad was the same quiet presence he had been at school, not a campus politician.

The next move was a master's in computer science at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

The American software job, and the Redmond title that followed it, sit on top of this coastal engineering record.

The plaza in the photograph is later than 1988.

The site is the same campus.

Photo: MIT Student Plaza, KshitizBathwal, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, 2019. Portrait: Satya Nadella, Brian Smale, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.