Lucknow Manvi, daughter of a daily wage earner, is one of the seven students from Uttar Pradesh flying to the US to chase her dream of pursuing higher education.
After clearing her Class 12 from VidyaGyan School in Bulandshahr, Manvi has secured admission to the Wellesley College that is rated highly among national liberal arts colleges in the United States.
When most of the girls from her area dropped out of school after Class 5, Manvi was determined to carve a niche for herself and complete her education.
“I studied at the government primary school in my village up to Class 5. I always topped my class. I appeared for VidyaGyan entrance examination and succeeded in securing a place in the institution’s first batch,” Manvi, who will get full a financial aid of $75,000 annually for four years, said.
The school starts from Class 6.
In 2014, Manvi became the first student from Bulandshahr’s VidyaGyan School to win the Kennedy Lugar Youth Exchange and Study Scholarship. She then travelled to Minnesota to complete Class 11 and studied at the Edison High School for a year.
After she returned to India to complete her Class 12, she was invited as a speaker to the recently concluded Global Citizen India Festival representing the potential of Indian village girls as future leaders.
The 18-year-old shared the stage with Google’s India head, the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) country head and celebrities from Bollywood and talked about her journey from a village to VidyaGyan and then Minnesota.
Manvi is determined to bridge the cultural gap between students from different countries of the world. She aspires to be a diplomat or serve the world by joining the United Nations or Amnesty International.
“I want to become a citizen of the world and represent India as well as women of developing countries,” she said.
And Manvi is not alone. Six other students from VidyaGyan’s graduating batch of 2017 have similar success stories.
Himanshu and Amrish are headed to the Purdue University to study robotics and mathematics and Darshan and Rudra will study engineering at Virginia Tech.
Sumit, who will head to the Pennsylvania State University to pursue an undergraduate degree in computer engineering, wants to become a software engineer and aspires to work with leading companies such as Google, Facebook, Infosys, HCL or Wipro.
Nischal is set to join the bachelor’s course in research and experimental psychology at the University of California, Davis. “I want to pursue research in socio personality (the impact of surrounding environment, interactions and other events on the personality of an individual).
He also wants to start a support organisation to work for the rehabilitation of beggars, child labourers, and the elderly.
These students were educated in Hindi medium and learnt to speak and communicate in English only in VidyaGyan School. They said they faced some difficulty in picking up the language initially but managed to overcome the problem with the help of teachers.
[“source-hindustantimes”]
