Punjab Engineering College and then went abroad to earn a doctorate in aerospace engineering from the University of Colorado, USA. Kalpana had a few select friends and would restrict herself to them and her studies. She learnt karate and became a black belt. She was mentally prepared to fight if any man tried to act smart with her.
She was fond of eating simple food and collecting precious stones. She loved a quiet environment and reading books. During those days, her favourite writers were Ayn Rand, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Salman Rushdie, Richard Bach and Oriana Fallaci. Besides helping her friends in studies, she regularly paid the fees for a poor batchmate out of her pocket money without the girl’s knowledge.
Although she believed herself to be no less than any boy and could do any task that they could, she disliked the more aggressive women’s liberation movement of the West. Kalpana always kept herself informed of developments in the world of aviation. She collected books and magazines on the subject and read them from cover to cover. Throughout her aeronautical studies at the sprawling campus of the college, she took active part in various extra-curricular activities, which eventually helped in her selection to an American University.
In the first year she wrote for the college magazine ‘PECMAC’ on precious stones and in the subsequent years she was the student editor. In the same year at the Annual Colloquium, she surprised her seniors by presenting a paper on ‘Time- lapse in Space’ dealing with Albert Einstein’s Theories of Relativity. Kalpana also became the Joint Secretary of the Aero and Astro Club of the college. Under its auspices, she arranged several lectures and seminars on issues, such as the role of woman in society, the political scenario in the subcontinent, etc.
She also conducted several quiz competitions. Once she arranged for the showing of the film ‘Those Magnificient Men in Their Flying Machines’ to her classmates when she came to know that they had not seen it. She was one of the few students who was interested in aero-modeling and regularly visited parks