WASHINGTON — Even at the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a top-ranked magnet school in Alexandria, Va., senior Pooja Chandrashekar stands out among her brainiac peers.
She’s 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. She also founded a national nonprofit that encourages middle school girls to participate in science, technology, engineering and math programs.
She’s also developed a mobile app that analyzes speech patterns and predicts with 96 percent accuracy if a person has Parkinson’s disease. Oh, and she’s 17.
College admissions offices took notice. She can now add another bullet to her résumé: Pooja earned admission to all eight Ivy League schools. She also was accepted at Stanford, MIT, Duke, the University of Virginia, the University of Michigan and Georgia Tech, going 14 for 14.
Earning an acceptance letter from one Ivy League school is an achievement for most high school students. It is extremely rare for a student to gain admission to all eight, though a few each year manage to do so. This year, Harold Ekeh of Long Island, N.Y., announced he, too, had been accepted to all the Ivies.
Pooja’s guidance counselor, Kerry Hamblin, said that the senior is dedicated to pushing herself in the classroom. “She’s taking the hardest courses, the most challenging that we offer, and has exceeded anyone’s expectations in all of them,” Hamblin said.
Born in Potomac Falls, Va., Pooja is the only child of two engineers who immigrated to the United States from Bangalore, India.
Pooja said she decided to apply to all eight Ivies hoping to get into just one. “They are all fantastic schools, so I couldn’t discount any of them,” she said. “I wanted to make sure I could get into a really good school and have more choices.”
