A few years ago I stood in an admissions hall watching bright students queue to enrol in B.Tech Computer Science. Half of them did not want to be there. You could see it. The parents beside them looked equally unsure.
They were not short of information. They knew what the degree was and they knew what it paid. What had never happened, to any of them, was the question itself. Nobody had sat them down and asked what they actually wanted to spend their days doing, or whether they knew what that involved.
By the time they reached that queue the decision was two years old and nobody remembered making it.
What we are building
Marga is not a better recommender. It is a structured occasion to be asked — rigorous enough that the answer is worth believing.
Underneath it is a map of Indian work: 427 job families from the National Classification of Occupations, each carrying measured requirements drawn from occupational data rather than written by hand. A student is placed on that map, and then measured against what work in that part of the map actually asks for.
The output is a distance, not a verdict. Nothing in it says what a student should become. Nothing in it says what they cannot do.
What we will not do
We will not rank careers by prestige. We will not accept money from a college to appear in a student’s results. We will not give a confident answer to a student whose answers we could not read — and we built a reading check specifically so we would know when that happens.
And when something we build does not work, we will say so. Our first pilot returned an internal consistency of zero. We wrote about it rather than shipping it.
Where it is now
The map is built. The assessment works and is free to use while we are in pilot. The reports, the exploration platform and the skill diagnostics are being built now, with schools, in the open.
If you run a school, teach, counsel students, or are simply a parent trying to work this out — I would like to hear from you. hello@marga.me