I am a final year undergraduate at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, Mumbai, India. I am majoring in Mechanical Engineering, simultaneously exploring my interests in Computer Science.
Entrance to the IITs is through the Indian Institutes of Technology Joint Entrance Examination (IIT-JEE). Acceptance rates to all the IITs fall well under 5%, with IIT Bombay, the most selective, accepting only 880 students (or 0.2%) of the total applicants. The IIT-JEE is widely considered to be one of the toughest exams in the world, both in terms of hardness of the problems to be solved as well as acceptance rates.
IIT-JEE 2010 was taken by about 455,000 candidates, in which I received an All-India Rank of 129. This works out to about 99.97 percentile.
For three consecutive years (2011-2013) I have been a recipient of the CBSE Merit Scholarship for Professional Studies, awarded for receiving an All-India Rank of 86 (or 99.99 percentile) in the All-India Engineering Entrance Examination (AIEEE) as well as academic standing at IIT. AIEEE forms the basis of the selection criteria to non-IIT engineering schools and was taken by about 1.1 million students in my year, making it the largest single day exam in the world.
At IIT Bombay, I hold a GPA (we call it a Cumulative Point Index or CPI) of 8.03/10.00 in my major and an aggregate of 8.83 in Computer Science courses.
During my three years at IIT Bombay I developed a strong inclination towards research. I have worked on a number of large, research-oriented projects at IIT Bombay, Nanyang Technological University and Harvard University. Additionally, I have been actively involved with a number of smaller, non-research projects and am a Student Member of the IEEE.
In particular, I am interested in Computer Vision, with a focus on vision-centric HCI and augmented reality applications. With the aim of pursuing further research in this line, I have taken numerous graduate-level courses that I believe will help me in my work.