Indian-origin girl is queen of the Ivy League
NEW DELHI: Indian-American student Pooja Chandrashekar has reason enough to feel on top of the world. At the age of just 17, she’s developed an app that analyses speech patterns to predict whether a person has Parkinson’s disease and set up a nationwide organisation to encourage young American girls to pursue careers in technology.
But that’s not all. She has also scored an admission to 14 top US universities, including all eight Ivy League schools.
Even among the brainy kids at Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a top-ranked school in the US, Pooja stands out with her 4.57 grade-point average and a score of 2,390 (out of 2,400) on the SAT (standardised entrance test for US colleges).
And now that she has the choice to get into the Ivy League schools or Stanford, MIT, Duke, the University of Virginia, the University of Michigan and Georgia Tech, the only child of engineers who migrated to the US from Bengaluru is dreaming of a career at the “nexus of medicine, technology and entrepreneurship as a physician developing innovative healthcare technologies”.
“I feel so honored and humbled to be accepted to these colleges and be recognised for my work and efforts over the past four years,” Pooja told Hindustan Times in an email interview.
She has narrowed her list to Harvard, Stanford and Brown, where she got into a programme that guarantees her admission to the university’s medical school.
Getting admission to one Ivy League school is a rare achievement for most US high school students and it is extremely rare for a student to get accepted at all eight, though a few manage to do so each year.
CONTINUED ON PAGE 8