A year after building CampusSphere, I found myself standing at a stall during E-Summit at IIT Roorkee, talking to a representative from InMobi.
I wasn't there for anything special.
I just wanted to know how internships worked at the company.
The conversation started the way most career conversations do.
I introduced myself, mentioned that I was a Civil Engineering student who liked technology, and asked about internship opportunities. The representative explained that many projects and opportunities often reached Computer Science students through professors and established channels.
That answer bothered me a little.
Not because it was unfair, but because I knew there were students outside CSE who were spending their evenings building things, participating in hackathons, and teaching themselves software development.
So I said something along those lines.
I told him that one of the reasons I liked hackathons and open competitions was that they gave people from every branch a chance to prove themselves. A good project doesn't care what your degree says.
Naturally, he asked what I had built.
That's when I mentioned CampusSphere.
The Story Behind the Story
CampusSphere wasn't a startup.
It wasn't funded.
It wasn't making money.
It was simply a map-based application I had built for IIT Roorkee students during the beginning of my second year.
Students could leave comments and messages pinned across locations on campus. Within less than a day, it had crossed 400 registered users.
The numbers themselves weren't the impressive part.
What interested him was how it happened.
We started discussing timing, user behavior, distribution, and why students decided to try the platform. Instead of talking about frameworks and APIs, we talked about people.
Why did students sign up?
Why did they share it?
Why did growth stop after a few days?
What would I do differently now?
The conversation shifted from software to products.
And then from products to business.
The Conversation That Kept Going
What I expected to be a quick interaction somehow stretched into nearly forty minutes.
We discussed building products as students, startup ideas, distribution strategies, positioning, and how different people approach technology.
The interesting part was that I wasn't trying to impress him.
I wasn't reciting prepared answers.
I wasn't trying to sound smarter than I was.
I was simply telling the story of something I had built and what I had learned from it.
That experience taught me something important.
People are often less interested in your technology than they are in your thinking.
Thousands of students can say they know React.
Many can list technologies on a resume.
Far fewer can explain why users behaved the way they did, what went wrong, what went right, and what they learned from the process.
Stories are memorable.
Technology changes every year.
Stories don't.
An Unexpected Opportunity
Toward the end of the conversation, he took my contact information and told me he'd let me know if something came up.
A while later, I received an online assessment invitation related to an internship opportunity.
The funny part is that I have never been particularly passionate about DSA.
That's not a criticism of DSA.
I understand why companies use it.
It's scalable, objective, and often a good proxy for problem-solving ability.
But personally, I've always enjoyed building products more than solving algorithmic puzzles.
When the interview happened, I was honest about that.
I told the interviewer that I wasn't particularly strong in DSA compared to many candidates.
Thankfully, he adjusted and gave me a simpler question, which I solved, although not very confidently.
Then the conversation shifted.
Instead of focusing entirely on algorithms, we started discussing my projects.
CampusSphere.
Travelore.
Why I built them.
What problems they solved.
What I learned from them.
At some point, the interview felt less like an assessment and more like a conversation.
And I enjoyed that part far more.
Why This Matters
The biggest takeaway wasn't the interview.
It wasn't the assessment.
It wasn't even the possibility of an internship.
The lesson was that small projects have a surprisingly long lifespan.
When I built CampusSphere, I thought it was just a fun experiment.
A year later, it was still opening doors.
Not because it was technically impressive.
Not because it generated revenue.
But because it gave me experiences, lessons, and stories worth talking about.
That's one reason I've become increasingly confident that I enjoy building more than anything else.
I like creating things.
I like talking to people about those things.
I like understanding why products succeed, fail, grow, or disappear.
Whether that eventually leads me toward startups, entrepreneurship, or something else entirely, I'm not sure.
But if a small side project can create opportunities a year after it's built, then building more of them seems like a pretty good bet.