Indian-origin student and entrepreneur Pooja Chandrashekar created history by securing admission at all eight Ivy League schools and six other top US universities.
“They are all fantastic schools, so I couldn’t discount any of them… I wanted to make sure I could get into a really good school and have more choices,” Chandrashekar told The Washington Post.
However, she cleared all of them and scored 2390 out of 2400 in her SAT, getting an average grade point of 4.57. She even excelled in all 13 Advanced Placement Exam and gained admission to all the Ivy League Universities: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Dartmouth, Columbia, Brown, and Pennsylvania.
Besides Ivy League schools, she got through Stanford, MIT, Duke, the University of Virginia, the University of Michigan, and Georgia Tech. But, Chandrashekar is keen on joining only three of the 14, Harvard, Stanford and Brown, as they have offered her admission into medical school. She now wants to explore the field of medicine and bio-engineering.
The Indian-origin teenager was born to an engineer couple, who stayed in Bangalore before moving to Virginia in US – where she was born and brought up. Like other teens, even Chandrashekar cherishes Bollywood songs and television shows like ‘Shark Tank’. However, she is not like every other teen as she is already an entrepreneur.
Chandrashekar studied in Nysmith School in Herndon before she joined Thomas JeffersonHigh School for Science and Technology, where she studied computing, artificial intelligence and DNA science.
Besides being a genius student, Chandrashekar is the founder and CEO of ProjectCSGIRLS, which is “a national youth-driven nonprofit working to close the tech gender gap by running a national computer science competition for middle school girls and workshops around the country,” according to her website poojachandrashekar.com.
She has even developed a mobile application that helps in “diagnosing concussions and a speech-based diagnostic test for Parkinson’s disease”. This app is believed to give 96% accurate diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease.
Chandrashekar loves speaking about her work and she has attended several conferences and summits around the country. She was part of the IEEE Women in Engineering International Leadership Conference, the Global Tech Women Voices Conference, the O’Reilly Velocity New York Conference, and the STEM Symposium for the National Capital Region, the website reads.
She has received altogether 30 honours and recognitions since 2010, including CIA Outstanding Student Scientist Award, and 1st Place Individual American Regions Mathematics League Local.