17-year-old NRI girl earns admission to all 8 Ivy League schools

                       Getting into one Ivy League school considered is a big deal but an Indian-origin student from Virginia earned admission to all eight ivies, which are considered the most prestigious universities worldwide.

Pooja Chandrashekar got a 4.57 grade-point average, scored a 2390 (out of 2400) on the SAT, and aced all 13 of her Advanced Placement exams, the Washington Post reported.

Virginia-born Pooja Chandrashekar said that she decided to apply to all eight ivies hoping to get into just one of them, because college admissions were really unpredictable. And now she is in a has to choose from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Dartmouth, Columbia, Brown, and the University of Pennsylvania besides six other including Stanford and MIT.

She has narrowed her list to Harvard, Stanford and Brown as there she can get into a  programme that ensures her admission to the university's medical school. 

Pooja Chandrashekar also founded a national non-profit organisation that encourages middle-school girls to participate in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) programs.

She also developed a mobile app that analyses speech patterns and predicts with 96 per cent accuracy if a person has Parkinson's disease.

In an email interview she told Hindustan Times: 'I feel so honored and humbled to be accepted to these colleges and be recognised for my work and efforts over the past four years.'

Pooja Chandrashekar's guidance counsellor, Kerry Hamblin was quoted by The Columbus Dispatch saying: 'She’s taking the hardest courses, the most challenging that we offer, and has exceeded anyone’s expectations in all of them.'

The 17-year-old senior at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in her website says she loves coding, creative writing, organising and participating in hackathons, traveling and tasting good food.

Obama's ex-girlfriends recall his 'sexual warmth' in new biography

London, May 3 (ANI): Former girlfriends of President Barack Obama have opened up for the first time of his "sexual warmth" and disclosed the contents of love letters that he sent to them during his 20s, in a new biography.


Genevieve Cook and Alex McNear, who had relationships with Obama in New York in the early 1980s, gave previously unseen material on Obama to David Maraniss, a Pulitzer prize-winning author.

Letters that Obama sent to McNear and journal entries by Cook depict a serious and earnest young man struggling to come to terms with his racial identity and place in modern American societ, the Telegraph reported.

In one diary entry from February 1984, Cook - a girlfriend for more than a year - noted that in their relationship "the sexual warmth is definitely there - but the rest of it has sharp edges".

She recalled "feeling anger" at Obama, whose "warmth can be deceptive".

Foreshadowing a criticism often levelled at the President today, she said: "Though he speaks sweet words there is also that coolness".

Cook mentioned meeting "Barry" at a Christmas party in 1983. After drinking Bailey's Irish Cream from the bottle, she chatted with him on an orange beanbag, before exchanging telephone numbers.

Her journal recall a 22-year-old man who wore "a comfy T-shirt depicting buxom women", and was marked by the smells of "running sweat, Brut spray deodorant, smoking, eating raisins, sleeping, breathing".

Cook "engaged [Mr Obama] in the deepest romantic relationship of his young life," but they separated in 1985, Maraniss wrote.

Reflecting on the "emotional scarring" that made him hard to get close to, she wrote at the time: "I guess I hoped time would change things, and he'd let go and 'fall in love' with me".

Her journal entries described a long effort to understand Obama.

"How is he so old already, at the age of 22?" she asked herself. "I have to recognise (despite play of wry and mocking smile on lips) that I find his thereness very threatening."

In another entry, she wrote that there was "so much going on beneath the surface, out of reach," adding that Obama was "guarded, controlled."

Meanwhile, McNear revealed an attempt at literary criticism by the young Obama, whom she had met at Occidental University in California, where they had both been studying.

The pair spent the summer of 1982 together in New York, following Obama's transfer to the city's Columbia University, and continued to correspond after McNear returned to Los Angeles.

In one exchange, Obama gave a densely-written opinion on T.S. Eliot, on whom McNear was writing a thesis.

"There's a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism. Eliot is of this type," he wrote.

McNear recalled to Maraniss - whose book is excerpted in the new issue of Vanity Fair magazine - that Obama was "obsessed with the concept of choice", musing: "Did he have real choices in his life? Did he have free will?"

As the multiracial product of an international upbringing, he complained of being "caught without a class, a structure, or tradition to support me" and envying the clearly defined lives of Pakistani friends. (ANI)




source: yahoo news