September 15th, 2026
On Wednesday, I was at Ashoka University to interview Professor Sandeep Juneja, Professor of Computer Science and Founding Director of the Safexpress Centre for Data, Learning and Decision Sciences at Ashoka University, with Amaira Akbar.
The conversation is now out on Spotify. We spoke about risk, uncertainty, decision-making, mathematics, computer science, and a lot more. It was a great experience, and I also got to meet Hamreet while I was there.
The rest of the week was filled with some equally interesting conversations.
I had a long conversation with Cheryl (Jingxing) Luo, an undergraduate studying Biology at the University of Oxford. We ended up discussing education, financial literacy, AI governance, biosecurity, startups, university admissions, India and China, and what we both want to do over the next few years.
I especially enjoyed comparing our experiences building education projects. We also discussed possible collaborations between her work and Edunomix.
I also spoke with Adarsh Kumar, Founder of Skillzo, Global Student Prize Laureate, studying at Georgetown University in Qatar, about a potential partnership between Skillzo and the Decoded Podcast for events and competitions. Exciting updates coming soon :)
On the Decoded side, we officially onboarded our newsletter team this week. We had our first meeting and are now getting the team properly off the ground. We are also looking for writers and designers who would like to join us. If you're interested, email me at akshat@thedecodedpodcast.com.
And then came the biggest thing of the week: the Decoded Podcast × HERizon student session with Cary S. Krosinsky on sustainable finance and the future of climate action.
We initially planned to cap registrations at 100. We forgot to turn the cap on, and ended up with 160+ registrations before we stopped them.
The event went extremely well. We had a great turnout, covered a huge range of ideas around sustainable finance, climate action, investing, and the future, and received a lot of incredibly positive feedback afterwards.
You can read some of the feedback here.
Finally, the Edunomix Institute India Economics Essay Competition is still open. We've received a ton of entries already, and the quality has been genuinely exciting to see. If you haven't submitted yours yet, please get it in soon. It's a pretty great competition, and I'd love to see more students take a shot at it. Learn more.
A lot happened this week, but what I enjoyed most was simply getting to have so many conversations with people building interesting things in completely different areas. There is always something new to learn when you put enough curious people in the same week.