Pooja Chandrashekar, 17, Earns Admissions In All 8 Ivy League Schools

Most high school students dream of studying at Harvard or Yale or Brown University, although only a few get through the stringent admission process and secure a seat. But here's a rare phenomenon who achieved the invincible: Pooja Chandrashekar.

In a stunner, Pooja, of Indian origin has secured a place in all 8 Ivy League Schools in the United States. The most prestigious institutes including Harvard, Brown, Cornell, Yale, Dartmouth, Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania have accepted her admission application, giving her a choice to select the one she wants.

Scoring 4.57 grade-point average and 2390 (out of 2400) on the SAT, gave her the competitive edge over other applications in all 14 institutes she applied for.

Pooja, born in Virginia, to Indian-origin parents who moved to the United States 25 years ago from Bengaluru to pursue engineering. Now both her parents work as engineers.

In an email interview to Hindustan Times, she said, “They obtained their master's degrees here in the US - my mom at Arizona State University and my dad at Texas A&M. I do still have family in Bangalore and Mysore and I do still visit India.”

She has rare achievements, interests and some great initiatives to her credit already:

Rare Achievement

When getting into one of the Ivy League Schools is an achievement, getting into all eight of them is extremely rare. Every university has different selection criteria and getting through all of them is simply amazing.

Attended STEM Classes

She has immense interest in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) and has attended classes in robotics, artificial intelligence, computing and other relevant subjects.

Excellent Student

Pooja who studied high school from Thomas Jefferson High School is an excellent student. The Washington Post quoted her guidance counselor, Kerry Hamblin, saying, “She’s taking the hardest courses, the most challenging that we offer, and has exceeded anyone’s expectations in all of them.”

Created an App

At just 17, she has developed an App that can sense whether a person is suffering from Parkinson's disease by analyzing the speech patterns. The App accuracy is said to be 96%.

Floated an Non-Profit Organization

Her achievements do not just end with that App, she has also floated a non-profit organization, ProjectCSGirls, to promote technology among girls. The organization conducts computer science competitions across the United States.

The official website of ProjectCSGirls says that the organization is meant to reduce the gender gap in tech industry, giving more girls an opportunity to learn and explore career options in technology.

After accepting the offers from the Ivy League Schools and other prestigious schools across the US, she has zeroed in three schools for now - Harvard, Stanford and Brown - but is yet to choose one from these three.

Source: Hindustan Times | The Washington Post

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