WASHINGTON — By the age of 17, Pooja Chandrashekar has accomplished more than many adults do in a lifetime. While a senior at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, she founded a nonprofit organization and even developed an app that can examine a person’s speech to see if he/she has Parkinson’s disease.
Now she can add another accomplishment to her list – earning admission to all eight Ivy League schools.
“I was really excited and surprised when I got into all of them,” says Chandrashekar of Potomac Falls, Virginia.
Chandrashekar applied to 14 schools in total, including all eight Ivies, with the hope of being accepted into just one. She was accepted into all of them and has narrowed her list down to three schools: Harvard, Stanford and Brown.
“There have been admissions officers emailing me and reaching out to me,” Chandrashekar says.
She credits her parents, both engineers, with being a driving force behind her success. When the acceptance letters began coming in from the universities, they opened them as a family.
“They [her parents] were freaking out, more than I was,” she says.
Chandrashekar excels in the classroom at Thomas Jefferson with a 4.57 grade-point average and was only 10 points shy of a perfect score on the SAT.
In addition to working on developing an app to diagnose Parkinson’s disease, the high school student also recently worked at the MITRE Corporation, helping professional engineers work on a new way of diagnosing concussions.
Her nonprofit, ProjectCSGirls, aims to build interest in middle school girls for programs in science, math and technology. She says her idea came from her own experience as one of few girls in computer science classes.
Chandrashekar’s goal is to eventually go to medical school and take on a career that involves developing innovative health care technology.
Her advice to other college-bound students is to “do what you love and try to excel in it.” Also, remember to make time in between all the hard work to have fun.
