A girl from Dadar has got admission in the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology without a Class X or XII certificate. Yes you read it right!

Malvika Raj Joshi, a 17 year old girl did not have Class X or XII certificate. The only thing that helped Malvika to get through MIT was her computer programming talent. With this, Ms Malvika, who joined the MIT 10 days ago, has set an example of how merit has more weightage than marks.

She got scholarship by MIT as she is pursuing her Bachelor of Science degree after getting a seat for being a three-time medal winner (two silver and a bronze) at International Olympiad of Informatics or what is commonly known as the Programming Olympiad.

Her story began about four years ago when she was in Class VII at Dadar Parsee Youth Assembly School and her mother had to pull her out of school. She said “When I started unschooling, I explored many different subjects. Programming was one of them. I found programming interesting and I used to give it more time.”

Supriya Joshi, Ms Malvika’s mother and an activist promoting home schooling, said, “Malvika was contacted by the MIT last September and joined it 10 days ago. In 2012, when she was in class VII, I realised that she was not enjoying her studies and took the tough decision to pull her out of school. However, Malvika’s sole focus remained on learning.”

She added: “In India, people are still not very aware about the term “home schooled” or “unschooled” as it is commonly referred. It also took sometime to convince my husband on this. The education in schools is rote-based and does not give the child the option of learning what they like. Hence, I designed a curriculum for them,” said Ms Supriya.

“Suddenly I saw that my daughters were happy. They were learning more than ever. Malvika became interested in programming and also participated in the IOI under the tutelage of Madhavan Mukund from Chennai Mathematical Institute . Without a class X or XII certificate, we enrolled her in CMI for an MSc-level course. She won three medals in the IOI and her performance got noticed by MIT,” said Ms Supriya, adding that though initially not interested, Malvika accepted the MIT offer following positive response from them.

The MIT has a provision for accepting students who are medal winners at various Olympiads (maths, physics or computers). It was Malvika’s medals that ensured that she can fulfill her aspirations of pursuing research work in her favourite subject i.e computer science.

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BY M.DIVYA SRI