Best graduate is all-rounder

With such reflection, it’s no surprise that the Technology, Policy and Management (TPM) Faculty recently named Iychettira the best graduate of the 2012-2013 academic year—a particularly impressive feat for a graduate whose master’s thesis hung in the balance not long ago.

The only child of two engineers, Iychettira grew up in Mysore and Bangalore. She earned her bachelor’s in electrical engineering at RV College of Engineering, and decided to earn a master’s degree in policy, which first appealed to her when she wrote an essay about sustainability, and, she says “because in India policy studies are quite uncommon.” She came to the TU’s Engineering and Policy Analysis department on scholarship in August 2011.

With Laurens de Vries as her advisor, Iychettira researched capacity markets for energy, working with a computer model to determine how capacity markets (organized markets for the capacity to generate electricity, rather than for the electricity itself) affect existing EU energy policies, and what kinds of cross-border effects such markets trigger. “I was very excited about it initially”, Iychettira said about her topic, which she thought seemed easy.  In fact, working with a pre-existing modelling program proved challenging, requiring Iychettira to learn LaTeX and several new computer languages, including Java and Gremlin.

“We actually gave her too big of an assignment”, said De Vries. This daunting scope was clear at Iychettira’s green light meeting when, although her committee saw the high potential in her research, they sent her back to work. Iychettira got new results and wrote the second part of the report again.  In August, she completed what De Vries describes as a really stellar thesis.  He added that a key to Iychettira’s success is that she didn’t give up when the situation became dire.

Ruben Verweij, another recent master’s recipient, worked closely with Iychettira. Verweij described her as an intelligent, inquiring, ambitious person who “really asks a lot of herself”, works collaboratively and isn’t afraid to ask questions.  De Vries agreed, calling Iychettira an impressive all-arounder.

Having struggled through problems so successfully that she earned her faculty’s recognition, Iychettira started work on her Ph.D. at the TU several weeks ago. She looks forward to eventually making “macro” changes to energy markets via policy.  “When I was 13, I wanted to change the world,” she explained.  “I guess I still do”.