New Delhi: Like lakhs of other students, 18-year-old Manu Chauhan from a village in Uttar Pradesh is awaiting his Class 12 results, but he does not seem too worried. Reason: Manu has been awarded a 100 per cent scholarship at Stanford University in California for an undergraduate programme in International Relations.
The son of an insurance salesman in Akrabad, a small village in UP’s Aligarh district, Manu’s journey from his village to Stanford is that of hard work and determination. His family did not have enough money to support his dreams, his parents struggled to make ends meet but that didn’t stop the young man’s aspirations.
Speaking to ThePrint, Manu said he applied to Stanford because it has the best research facilities. Given his own struggles, his dream is to study policy and work towards creating avenues for access to better education for underprivileged children.
“I understand the pain of not having enough resources to achieve one’s dreams. Hence, I want to make this process easier for children of my village.”
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Long hours of study
Getting to this point was not an easy feat, and included upto 18 hours of study daily. “I used to wake up at 6 am, then attend school till 2 pm, after which I would rest and finish my homework. In the evenings, I would play an hour of table tennis and sit down to study for the SATs from 8 pm to 2 am,” said Manu. The SAT is the standardised test students seeking admission to US colleges need to take.
The UP student said that there were many distractions and tough days but he kept going.
Till Class 5, Manu studied at a government school in Akrabad, after which he was selected for the VidyaGyan Academy, a residential school in Bulandshahr in UP. While his experience of studying in a government school was not bad, his parents wanted something better for him.
After a year of preparation, Manu was able to secure a scholarship for VidyaGyan, a philanthropic initiative by the Shiv Nadar Foundation. The academy receives over two lakh applications annually of which 250 meritorious students from families, with an annual income of less than Rs 1 lakh, are educated at no cost.
While on one hand Manu was working hard, on the other, he said, he struggled with holding on to his dream. “The biggest challenge for me was to believe that I can be the boy from a small village who can go to a good university in the US. I had to compete with my urban, privileged contemporaries. Just preparing myself to believe in myself took me three long years,” he said.
Manu is a resident of Akrabad, a village of around 6,000 people, located 21 kilometres from Aligarh.
He added that being at VidyaGyan helped him a lot. Teachers and counsellors at VidyaGyan helped him prepare for his Stanford application.
“My counsellors used to review my essays and give me an outside perspective on what could be done better. Mentors at my institute also helped me figure out areas to focus on while I prepared for the SAT.”
Not just this, he was also able to give eligibility examinations like TOEFL and SAT with scholarship grants. He said, “There are several foundations that provide students with a fee for appearing for these exams. Students have to show academic credentials and the challenges they are facing, based on which they are given scholarships.”
The teen is now set to fly to the US this September.
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Doing one’s best
Manu’s father Pramod Kumar Chauhan has an equal role to play in his son’s success. It was Chauhan who recognised his son’s potential at a very young age and looked for schools that could shape his dreams.
Chauhan is an insurance salesman working in Akrabad, and his wife is a homemaker. The couple sent their son to a hostel so that he could “make it big in life”. They knew that they would not be able to support his dreams financially, but they gave him the best they could.
Narrating his son’s tale of determination, 47-year-old Chauhan said, “Manu used to live in a hostel in Bulandshahr, some 80 kilometers away from us. Everyday he used to study till late and we would keep up with him all night. Ours is a family of limited means, there is no way I would have been able to afford sending him to the US. His counsellors at Shiv Nadar helped him with the entire process.”
The personality test
Manu was a regular attendee at debate competitions and is an avid table tennis player. He won a gold medal in the Open State Level Table-Tennis championship in 2018. He says building a personality and enhancing his interests helped him set a unique identity for himself during the interviews for Stanford.
“Academics are secondary … what the universities there look at are your SAT scores and your extracurriculars. I used these activities to imbibe several life skills. In the essays that I wrote for the applications, I made sure that my true self and my learning were reflected,” he says.
The 18-year-old says that the pandemic did make things difficult for him but he was able to rely on online means to gather course material. “Internet connectivity in rural areas is very poor and I had to come back home during the lockdown. Getting reading material was very difficult but a few websites and Indian students in the US helped a lot. Indian students in the US have made videos giving tips on the application process.”
(Edited by Manasa Mohan)
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