I arrived in Australia as an international student with a suitcase and a university offer. I walked kilometres to save 60 cents on bus fares. I cleaned shopping centres at 4am. Twenty years later — four properties, full-time trading, and a business built to help others navigate the same system I once had to figure out alone.
The flight landed and I had a university offer, a suitcase, and almost nothing else. I was enrolled in a Master of ICT Management and Information Systems at the University of Wollongong — a degree that sounded impressive and cost every cent my family could put together. Back home in India I had completed a Bachelor of Electronics and Telecommunications Engineering — the foundation that would eventually underpin everything from network architecture to cybersecurity to the trading systems I now run daily. What nobody tells you about arriving as an international student is how quickly the money runs out, and how fast you learn that survival in Australia requires a particular kind of stubbornness.
I needed work. Not one job — three.
The schedule looked like this: grocery store, 8am to 3pm. Coles, 5pm to 10pm. And then — the one that still feels surreal to say out loud — cleaning the Queen Victoria Building in Sydney from 4am to 7am. I did this for three years. I walked kilometres each way on some days because saving 60 cents on a bus fare actually mattered. Every dollar was counted. Nothing was wasted.
And yet — I also lived. Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Japan, India, Sri Lanka, the Middle East. Even then, working three jobs and studying, I understood that life was happening now — not after I had saved enough, not after the degree was finished. The discipline of saving and the decision to spend on experiences weren't contradictions. They were the same instinct: make everything count.
The degree finished. The jobs continued — until they didn't have to. I landed my first role in technology: Pre-Sales Engineer, working on architecture design for networking and security. It was the job I had been working towards in every 4am shift, every double, every late night with textbooks open next to a meal packed in a lunchbox from home.
Seven years building expertise — network architecture, security design, pre-sales engineering. I learned how enterprise technology actually works: not from textbooks but from sitting across from CIOs, drawing solutions on whiteboards, defending proposals in boardrooms. Then a cybersecurity vendor came calling, and I moved into the next chapter.
For nearly a decade I worked across some of Australia's most complex technology environments — Financial Services, Construction, Retail. The work was serious: selling and architecting SD-WAN deployments, perimeter firewall solutions, cloud security platforms. Large FSI institutions. Major infrastructure projects. Clients who needed solutions that actually worked, not just solutions that looked good in a slide deck.
Pre-sales at this level is part engineer, part strategist, part storyteller. You have to understand the technology deeply enough to design it, and understand the business deeply enough to sell it. Those nine years sharpened both sides of that skill simultaneously. I didn't know it yet, but I was building the instincts that would eventually translate into something entirely different.
I navigated Australia's immigration system the hard way — without guidance, without a portal, without anyone to explain what each step meant. Migragent exists so the next person doesn't have to.
Try Migragent Free →When COVID hit and the world stopped, I did what I have always done when given unexpected time: I studied. In 2020, while the industry was in lockdown and client meetings moved to Zoom, I enrolled at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) to complete a Graduate Diploma in Migration Law. Not because I had to — because I wanted to understand the system that had shaped my entire life in Australia from the inside.
I had lived through it as an international student, navigated it as a skilled worker, watched friends and colleagues struggle with visa conditions they did not fully understand, and seen what happens when people get bad advice or no advice at all. Migration law was not an abstract academic exercise for me. It was the most personal subject I had ever studied.
That degree — built during the strangest years of recent memory, in spare hours between work and family — is the foundation on which Migragent is built. Not just the technical knowledge of the Migration Act 1958 and the visa subclasses and the points test, but the understanding of what it actually feels like to sit on the other side of the system. To need answers and not know where to find them.
The first property came in 2018. A two-bedroom unit in North Parramatta — 10% deposit, every cent of it earned through years of stacking savings from three jobs, then a professional salary. It wasn't glamorous. It was a deliberate, calculated first move on a board I had been studying for years.
2019 brought something different and considerably more volatile: a personal loan borrowed to trade derivatives — options, calls and puts. This was not a conservative move. It was a calculated bet on myself, made with the same conviction that had driven every other decision. Some of it worked. Some of it didn't. All of it taught me something irreplaceable about risk, discipline, and the difference between a trade and a gamble.
The second property came in 2020 — this time as a Principal Place of Residence. Then the grind continued, quietly and consistently, in the background of everything else. Hundreds of thousands of dollars made through a combination of discipline, compounding, and refusing to stop learning.
The third property was acquired through a Self-Managed Super Fund — a residential investment in Ballarat, Victoria. The SMSF pathway requires planning, patience, and an understanding of the regulatory environment that most people never develop. For me, it was the natural next step in building a structure that would work across decades, not just years.
The fourth property followed — Andrews Farm, Adelaide. Same discipline. Same patience. Different market. The portfolio now spans multiple states and asset classes, built entirely from the ground up by someone who once walked kilometres to save sixty cents.
Trading began in earnest with derivatives — options on equities, futures, the instruments that reward precision and punish complacency. The early years were a graduate school that charged real money for its lessons. I moved into futures trading and took losses. Significant ones. A drawdown of USD $200,000 — the kind of number that ends most people's trading careers before they properly begin.
I started again. Fifty thousand Australian dollars into SPY, QQQ, NASDAQ derivatives — the instruments I understood best, in the markets I had studied longest. No revenge trading. No desperation. Just process, discipline, and the willingness to be patient that I had first learned cleaning a shopping centre at 4am.
Two years later the portfolio had rebuilt to its previous highs — and kept going. The lesson wasn't about the money. It was about what it takes to come back from a significant loss without letting it define you. The answer, it turns out, is exactly the same thing that got me through three jobs and a Master's degree simultaneously: keep it small, keep it consistent, and never stop.
I trade two hours a day. Pure. Focused. The rest of the day belongs to my family, to Migragent, to the kind of life I walked kilometres and cleaned floors at 4am to eventually have. The portfolio is consistent. The properties are compounding. The business is growing.
Between all of it — the shifts, the career, the properties, the trades — there was always travel. Not as a reward for work done, but as part of the work itself. Seeing the world changes how you think about risk, opportunity, and what's actually possible.
Standing in the heart of Wall Street — the physical place where the markets I trade every morning originate — was one of those moments where the distance between where you started and where you are becomes visible all at once. I thought about the QVB. About the 4am alarm. About the sixty cents.
I built Migragent because I studied migration law at UTS — and because I know from lived experience what it feels like to navigate Australia's immigration system without a guide. I know what it's like to not understand what a bridging visa means, or whether your student visa allows you to work the hours you need to work, or what pathway actually leads to permanent residency from where you're standing right now.
Nobody should have to figure that out alone — at 4am, after a cleaning shift, with a textbook open on the kitchen table.
Migragent is the tool I wish had existed when I arrived. An AI portal that gives you real answers about Australian visa pathways, requirements, and options — instantly, accurately, and without a $400 consultation fee.
If you're at the beginning of your Australian story — the three jobs, the tight budget, the uncertainty about what comes next — this is for you.
Check your visa options, understand your pathway to permanent residency, and get answers to the questions that matter — free, 24/7, powered by AI trained on Australian immigration law.
Try Migragent Free →