BENGALURU: They didn’t take up social projects to get good scores in International Baccalaureate (IB). Listening to their conscience, these IB students — who are now set to chase their Ivy League dreams — chose their community endeavours with care and undertook projects where the leitmotif was change.
Rithana Srikanth
and
Neha Bharat
from Indus International School built Clean Up Bengaluru (CUB) in 2016. The club of eight classmates would research and identify public spaces being littered upon. “We tied up with The Ugly Indian to clean up and paint walls and surroundings of these black spots. In two years, we cleaned up nine black spots between
Marathahalli
and Kadubeesanahalli,” says Rithana, who scored 44 out of 45 points in IB and is headed to University of
California
, Los Angeles (UCLA) to study neuroscience.
“I want to study neuroscience with psychology because they are inter-connected,” Rithana says. Neha secured 42 points and is headed to University of Michigan to pursue double major in mathematics and biology. “I may transfer to business studies later, if I want to switch majors,” she said.
Their friend Siddarath Ramanan, who is also going to UCLA to study computer science engineering, developed a website called Donate Now which connects NGOs and prospective donors. “I took photographs of NGOs donating to children to build confidence among the donors,” he said.
Many IB students weaved their academic and social interests while taking up community projects. Some of them were able to decide on their careers by discovering their potential in the endeavours. Neev Parikha, who secured a perfect 45 in IB fro Greenwood High International School, decided to study entrepreneurship along with computer science in his undergraduate programme in Brown University, the US.
“In summer 2017, I worked with a startup that was helping local provisional stores open accounts in government banks. I was researching on how to help rural citizens become financially stable and how to improve methods to retain their rural customers for future businesses. That gave me the idea to become an entrepreneur and I want to build enterprises that have sustainable social impact,” he said.
He also collected toys from his apartment with friends and distributed them to Thayimane, an orphanage near Sarjapur, and helped fix a desktop for students of a government school.
Shreya Singhal of The International School Bengaluru secured a perfect 45 and is going to Imperial College London to study microbiology with English literature. She taught at Samarthanam Trust orphanage for several weeks.
Shankar R of Stonehill International School will study computer science and linguistics in Stanford University. His love for linguistics drove him to develop a web application to connect sentiments with words from tweets on the Syrian crisis. “For example, use of the word ‘migrant’ instead of ‘refugee’ changes the sentiment of the language. I presented a research paper on this,” he said.
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