In Virginia, Washington, a 17-year-old Indian origin girl has accomplished what most will consider an impossible feat. She has managed to get accepted to all eight Ivy League schools as well as six other elite universities. Pooja Chandrashekhar has achieved a great deal in her young years, but this by far is her greatest achievement.
Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Dartmouth, Columbia, Brown and the University of Pennsylvania are the eight Ivy Leagues that have happily accepted this Virgina born teenager. The only daughter to two engineers from Bangalore, Pooja is an extremely special girl. She scored a 2390 (out of 2400) in her SAT exams, got a 4.57 grade point average (translates to 99th percentile) and aced all 13 of her Advanced Placement exams.
Apart from academics, she is enterprising, creative and takes great initiative. During her school years she founded a national non-profit that encourages middle-school girls to study science, technology, engineering and math (STEM); she built a windmill to explore aspects of renewable energy and most impressively she developed an app that analyses speech patterns and predicts with 96% accuracy if a person has Parkinson’s disease.
It is usually not advisable or typical for people to apply to all Ivy League schools. The application is tiring and cumbersome and most colleges have separate requirements. But Pooja aimed for all eight, hoping to get into just one, as “college admissions is [sic] really unpredictable”, as she told Times of India. “They are all fantastic schools and I didn’t want to leave any one out of consideration”.
Pooja has narrowed her list to Harvard, Stanford and Brown, where she has been guaranteed admission into the university’s medical school. She hopes to pursue a program in liberal medical education and bio-engineering.