Indian American student accepted to 8 Ivy League schools

A 17-year-old girl has secured seats to eight Ivy League universities in the U.S. that are widely known for their highly competitive admission processes, drawing keen attention from the public.

The Washington Post said on Sunday that Pooja Chandrashekar, the only child of an immigrant couple, both engineers from India, earned admission to all of the 14 universities she applied. She is welcomed not only by the eight Ivy League schools including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Columbia, Brown and Pennsylvania, but also by other prestigious schools including Stanford, MIT and Duke.

Generally, American universities do not recruit students based solely on grade-point average, because each school has their own unique characteristics and strengths. Then which merits of Chandrashekar would have appealed the prestigious schools?

A senior at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a top-ranked magnet school for gifted students in Virginia, stood out in academic performance. She received GPA of 4.57 (out of possible 5), and scored a 2390 (out of 2400) on the SAT. Kerry Hamblin, Chandrashekar’s guidance counselor, said, “She’s taking the hardest courses, the most challenging that we offer, and has exceeded anyone’s expectations in all of them.” Principal Evan Glazer said, “She’s a science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) superwoman who humbly approached her interests in curious ways.”

Chandrashekar’s distinguished capacity was also displayed in extracurricular activities as well. She developed a mobile app that analyzes speech patterns and predicts with 96 percent accuracy if a person is suffering from Parkinson’s disease. She also established a national non-profit organization that encourages junior high school girls to participate in STEM programs. At junior high, she created and tested a windmill by herself due to her keen interest in renewable energy. The Washington Post expressed alarm, saying that all these were achieved by a 17-year-old girl.

Of the 14 schools that sent her acceptance letters, she has shortlisted her potential choices to Harvard, Stanford and Brown, because their programs guarantee her admission to the university’s medical school. In an interview with the daily, Chandrashekar said she want to study areas of research interest at medical school .

snow@donga.com