My Name is Himanshu. I saw Charul’s Magic stories campaign and immediately wanted to be a part of it by sharing my story. This is a story of the challenges I faced while transitioning from a student to a professional and how the Universe supported me to keep the hope alive. I passed out from school in 1997 and deep within had an aspiration to join Indian Army. I cleared written exam in 1998 but was not able to get through the SSB interview. So, the dream of joining the Armed forces was shattered. I had to, then, choose an alternate career option; something that I had never really thought of. Luckily, for Hotel management there used to be a similar pattern exam as it was for NDA. I, therefore, filled Hotel Management entrance form in 1998 and having cleared it, I joined IHM Jaipur in July 1999 for a 3-year diploma course. By that time, I had also completed 2 years of B.com. I found Hotel Management course challenging and developed a passion to join front office department thereafter. As it is said ‘In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not’, similarly no Hotel Management course is complete without practical training. In HM course there is 6 months hands on training in 2nd year. Therefore, after the completion of 1st year of Hotel Management diploma, I joined Ram Bagh Palace Jaipur (Taj Group Hotel for my summer training). Now was the time to reap the benefits of all the hard work that I did during the Hotel Management education. My diploma was done in April 2002 and I was expecting a good job in hand. However, there were hardly any campus interviews for our batch as it was the situation of crisis due to the twin tower blasts in US in the year 2001. Indian tourism industry was badly impacted by that and tourist flow from US and European countries was almost nil. I tried my luck with some small hotel brands, but the Management there was not professional enough. I lost interest but all through this struggle, didn’t lose hope. In year 2002, the call center industry was booming in India; so, I thought of trying my luck there. However, before going for a new job, I wanted to grab the B.com degree which I completed in 2003 and came to Gurgaon. I tried in call centers but was not able to clear the interviews as their primary requirement was fluent English which I was lacking. Nothing seemed to work, and the hope was diminishing. One fine day magic happened, and I realized that although it wasn’t visible to me, God had started working on the magic, preparing for my success even before I knew it. I saw an advertisement in a National Daily Newspaper that an organization in Noida was looking for B.com graduates for payroll department. I appeared for the interview and fortunately cleared it. My first salary was INR 8000 per month. It started getting better from there and life has been a journey full of magical moments ever since then. With extensive experience in payroll processing industry both in the field of Indian and US payroll processing, currently, I am working as Global Operations Manager with leading US HRO Company and residing in Gurgaon. All this would not have been possible without that little magic that happened 18 years ago!