Winter Arc

Winter break? Nah, for me, it was a Winter Arc.

While everyone else called it a winter break and made plans to go home or travel around the U.S., I saw it differently. For me, it was a Winter Arc, a rare chance to push myself in ways I might never have time for during the busy semester.

The Challenges

I wanted to use this period to become a stronger, more capable candidate. So, I reached out to product managers (PMs) and product marketing managers (PMMs) I knew and asked for their best advice. Their top recommendation was to volunteer on an unpaid project at a startup.

Plan A : I secured two offers, only to discover that my program didn’t qualify for CPT.
Plan B : I considered flying back to India to work remotely without visa hurdles. But the travel cost, time, and inevitable distractions didn’t add up.

Things I ended up doing:

Pseudo PM Project - orgGPT

I built my own pseudo project: orgGPT. This hypothetical product idea became the foundation for practicing Product Management (PM) and Product Marketing (PMM) deliverables.

Here’s what I accomplished:

Learned 7 new tools and went from “I have heard of Jira” to “I can use it confidently”.
- Prepared Empathy maps, Journey maps, Market positioning maps, User personas, Product roadmaps, Backlog report, MVP scope, PRD, Feature Prioritization Framework (MoSCoW), GTM strategy, Messaging framework, and Wireframe.

Completed the entire project in 10 days, from researching, learning, planning, to execution.

Portfolio and Content Planning

Spent 5 days planning and polishing the content for this site to reflect a detailed narrative, which totaled over 9,500 words.
Built this fully customized website on Wix in just 6 days, overcoming the challenges of conceptualizing, designing, and debugging. (Attached the Canva screenshots below to give an approximate idea of the level of customization. For comparison, imagine the time it might take just to conceptualize the landing page of a site, let alone solving the bugs and fixing errors.)
Planned a series of LinkedIn posts set to roll out from February onwards to boost my professional visibility and engagement.
Worked on a policy document due on 20th January for the Policy Hackathon at the India Conference at Harvard (ICH).

Routine
Beyond my professional goals, I set some personal challenges to keep me sharp and disciplined:

28 days of running in the snow (didn’t snow some days)
Zero added sugar products
Zero human interaction (except for one brief instance)
Zero entertainment (aside from watching Shark Tank during dinner)
A strict and same diet (though that’s not new for me, check out my personal page to see what exactly I eat daily)
1.5 hours of workouts every day
8.5 hours of sleep every night (even if I stayed up until 4 AM, I made sure to complete my sleep quota)

Final Thoughts

Christmas? New Year? They looked different this year. And to be honest, it was the best New Year I have ever had - the guilt vs. positivity definitely makes a huge difference.

While I was constantly missing my roommates, it was outweighed by the growing stress with each passing day about whether I’d achieve anything worthy this month. I started with almost no understanding of these PM concepts. Each concept or tool took hours, sometimes days, to learn and apply. This fear of failing led to sleepless work nights.

The Hardest Part

Unstructured learning breaks motivation. Without a syllabus or a guide, plus the lack of clarity on where to start and what to do next, it’s very easy to fall into the trap of procrastination.

But the biggest lesson was: when you don’t have access to distractions, it’s easier to stay on track.

Images:

(My everyday dinner)