Rishabh Singh

Rishabh Singh, a Class XII student of DAV, BSEB, has become the pride of the state by bagging a full scholarship for a four-year undergraduate programme in computer science (with an annual fee of $58,000) in Brown University, Rhode Island, US.

The 17-year-old Patna boy claims to be the only one from the state to get through to the university till date. Rishabh aspires to start a technology and finance firm one day.

A beaming Rishabh told The Telegraph: “I will like to employ Artificial Intelligence to create a different set of operating systems and also use related software to make smarter investments at Wall Street.”

Rishabh is the founder-president of a non-profit organisation — Youth for Planet (YfP) — which works for education, entrepreneurship and empowerment. Launched in August, 2008, YfP is patronised by Kalidas Ghalib Foundation headed by M. Katju and Niraj Sharan. The organisation had been lobbying for the Indian delegation at the United Nations in the past and a digital charter would be launched by June this year.

Rishabh said: “The best way to effect change is to engineer agents of change. So, we started YfP to inspire people towards all our initiatives.”

The teenager has been working on designing and operating systems in employing concept of computational linguistics, data mining and machine learning for around a year.

Rishabh said: “Brown University is the alma mater of seven Nobel laureates and several prominent personalities such as Apple CEO John Sculley, founder of CNN Ted Turner, Bank of America CEO-cum-chairman Bryan Moynihan, IBN chairman and CEO Thomas Watson.”

Rishabh took the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) with subjects like physics, chemistry and mathematics. He also took TOEFL last year and later had an interview with a Brown University alumnus.

The teenager said: “The interview was very good. The interviewer asked me why I wanted to attend the university and why I wanted to go to the US and not just stay in India. He asked me why I did not opt for an Indian college education. Citing the work of Professor Eugene Charniak, my first reply was that his work matched my career interest. Next, I said America had a more receptive environment towards new ideas, start-up culture and entrepreneurship.” Rishabh said the interviewer told him at the end that he was sure that Rishabh would do a lot of great things in future.

Rishabh said the most important thing in life was to find one’s passion — something that one would do for free and then pursue with a perfectionist’s zeal.

Not only did Rishabh qualify for Brown University after competing against 30,000 students from across the world but he also selected a different path when almost all his batchmates were busy preparing for competitive examinations like the Joint Entrance Examination. Rishabh looks forward to the international outreach of YfP at Brown University.