Biography | Sundar Pichai — The Main Building Where a Metallurgist Took the Institute Silver Medal

People treat a Google career as a computer-science story.

The degree on this campus was in metallurgical engineering.

Pichai entered the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur after finishing Class XII in Chennai in 1989.

He studied in the Department of Metallurgical and Materials Engineering from 1989 to 1993 and took a B.Tech. that year.

Sanat Kumar Roy, a professor in the department, told Business Standard in August 2015 that Pichai was the best student of the class and received the B. C. Roy Silver Medal for the highest marks.

Stanford later listed the same honour as an Institute Silver Medal.

The main building in front of this pin still carries the line "Dedicated to the service of the nation."

IIT Kharagpur opened in 1951 in the old Hijli Detention Camp.

The present administrative block, lecture halls, and twin auditoriums were the public face of the campus by the time Pichai arrived.

He was not a computer-science undergraduate.

The department trained him on metals, heat, and the behaviour of materials — the same field he would take to Stanford for a master's in materials science.

On 7 August 2015, four days before Larry Page named him chief executive of Google, IIT Kharagpur gave him its Distinguished Alumnus Award at the 61st convocation.

He received it in absentia.

When journalists first rang the institute after the Google announcement, staff did not recognise the public name.

A professor had to translate Sundar Pichai back into P. Sundararajan, the student on the medal list.

The campus is public.

The pin is the main building, not a hostel or a current office.

Photo: IIT Kharagpur main building, Ambuj Saxena, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.

Portrait: Sundar Pichai in 2014, Maurizio Pesce, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.