What about students who manage to clear every single competitive exam when we see that clearing one is a huge achievement in itself? This student prodigy from Surat, Gujarat cracked both the engineering and medical entrances. Now, you might imagine that this student is kind of a nerd who studied 24 hours and might not have had any hobbies as such. You are slightly wrong here — Stuti Khandwala is a trained Bharatanatyam dancer and she also teaches dance to underprivileged kids in her area. She has completed her 7th year as a part of her formal training in Bharatanatyam and is now training for her Alankar which is the eighth year.
Stuti, who hails from Surat, studied for the last three years in Kota, Rajasthan at the Disha Delphi Public School. The 18-year-old achieved a rare feat by making it to the merit list of JEE Main 2019, NEET 2019, JIPMER MBBS 2019 and AIIMS MBBS 2019. And that's not all. She is not going to occupy a seat in any of the top colleges in the country as she has been selected by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US. Stuti is going to pursue Bioengineering and Computer Science for her four-year graduation course at MIT.
Stuti tells Edex that her school taught her well and helped prepare for the entrances. "I studied Physics, Chemistry, Maths and Biology for my 12th boards. Regular schooling helped me immensely as the CBSE syllabus is on par with these entrances. What is taught in our NCERT course textbooks is what these entrances are all about. They have questions mainly from our course syllabus that I studied for two years. I did not find it difficult to cope with. For practice, I used to solve previous year question papers, a month before each entrance I maintained a habit of solving the papers. The question banks from my coaching Class — Allen Career Institute in Kota, also helped me get there," she explains.
Stuti scored 98.8 per cent in her boards. Although the 18-year-old says that she loves Biology, she would also want to take up research and thus need the other subjects like Maths, Physics and Chemistry. Speaking about her study routine before the entrances, she says, "I never made schedules for myself, I used to decide my study flow as and when I felt like it and there was a need to. Typically, I used to wake up by 5 am in the morning and study for 12-13 hours a day including school hours. Then I needed at least 7-8 hours of sleep. Whenever I got bored I used to watch cooking or Tom and Jerry videos on YouTube." Apart from this, she also likes reading and watching TV but she says that she had to abandon all that for the last three years.
Her parents have always been very supportive of whatever decision she has taken in her life, academically. And so, they do not have an issue with their daughter wanting to pursue research at MIT. On why Stuti chose to pursue research, she explains, "Medicine and engineering I thought would narrow my scope of subjects, if I get into medicine I will be totally disconnected from Physics, Chemistry, and Maths. Then if I want to get back to any kind of research later it would be difficult, I feel."
