Raj Thakker first met Trisha Vijay on the Bollywood dance team at the University of California, Berkeley in September 2014. His first impression was that she wasn’t the type of person he’d normally befriend.
“I was always more on the quiet and reserved side,” Mr. Thakker said, “whereas she was more of the pretty, outgoing girl.”
But when the two teamed up to helped organize a fund-raiser for the dance team, they became fast friends. They discovered that they had been born in the same neighborhood in Fremont, Calif., though Ms. Vijay grew up there, while Mr. Thakker’s family moved to Saratoga, Calif. During the next couple of years, their respect and admiration for each other grew.
“He’d help other people on our team with their computer science coursework,” Ms. Vijay said. “I thought that was a really good quality. He’s extremely patient.”
Eventually, in late 2016, during Ms. Vijay’s senior year, they began dating. After she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in economics, Ms. Vijay, 29, remained in the San Francisco Bay Area and began working at Amazon, where she is now a principal product manager for Prime Video.
Mr. Thakker, 28, graduated the same year with a bachelor’s degree in computer science and is now a senior software engineer at YouTube, which is part of Google.
