PIO teen cracks all 8 Ivy League schools, plus 6

WASHINGTON: Acceptance to one Ivy League school is considered a big deal in U.S academic circles in this college admission season, but try telling that to Pooja Chandrashekhar, who is being welcomed by all eight IVS, plus six other elite universities, for a unique 14/14 record.
Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Dartmouth, Columbia, Brown, and the University of Pennsylvania are the eight Ivy Leagues that will be happy to accept the Virginia-born 17-year old, the only daughter of two engineers who emigrated from Bangalore.Also in the running for her — Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford, Duke, Georgia Tech, the University of Virginia, and the University of Michigan.
So what's so special about Pooja? A SAT score of 2390 (out of 2400), a 4.57 grade point average, and acing all 13 of her Advance Placement exams helped. But what also boosted her application is enterprise, initiative, and creativity.
She founded a national non-profit that encourages middle-school girls to participate in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) programs; built a windmill to explore aspects of renewable energy and also developed a mobile app that analyzes speech patterns and predicts with 96 percent accuracy if a person has Parkinson’s disease.
"She really stands out as a TJ kid who has taken the mission of the school as far as it can go," Principal Evan Glazer of Thomas Jefferson, a highly-regarded school in Virginia where Pooja graduated from, told the Washington Post, which first reported the story. "She’s a STEM superwoman who humbly approached her interests in curious ways."
It is not typical, nor is it advised, for students to apply to all eight Ivy League schools, which derive the term from the original "Interscholastic Four League," (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia) which were dubbed IV (eye vee). The application process is intense and cumbersome and each has different strengths and requirements.
But Pooja aimed for all eight ivies hoping to get into just one of them, "because college admissions is really unpredictable."
"They are all fantastic schools and I didn’t want to leave any one out of consideration," she told TOI over phone on Saturday amid the trill of congratulatory called. "I wanted to make sure I could get into a really good school and have more choices." She spent a large part of last summer working on applications, writing supplementary essays for each of them.
Her parents, Chandrashekar Doddaveeriah (BMS College of Engineering and Texas A&M) and Pratibha Bore Gowda (MS Ramaiah College of Engineering; Arizona State University) fully supported her go-for-all-IVS decision.
Pooja has now narrowed her list to Harvard, Stanford and Brown, where she got into a program that guarantees her admission to the university’s medical school. She eventually hopes to pursue a program in liberal medical education and bio-engineering.
Although she sounds like an alpha-geek, Pooja is like a typical teenager in many ways. She enjoys watching television shows like Shark Tank, eating out — and, no surprise, listening to Bollywood music.
Pooja is the second immigrant high-schooler in recent weeks to nail admission to all eight Ivies. Harold Ikeh, a Long Island teenager who was born in Nigeria and was eight when his parents emigrated to the U.S also scored a 8/8 and admission to five other schools — MIT, NYU, Johns Hopkins University, Stony Brook University and Vanderbilt University.