About The Fellowship

I-Stem launched the fellowship program to identify and support exceptional students with disabilities from around the country. After a multi-step rigorous selection process, we are excited to announce our first class of I-Stem fellows. Each of the fellows have been paired with two corporate mentors and an I-Stem contact to help them support in their respective areas of interest. Each fellow also receives a free trip to our annual event in January 2020 where they will network with other students with disabilities, corporate professionals, hiring managers and senior executives. Special thanks to Microsoft and Morgan Stanley for supporting the program.

Ankit Soni

Ankit Soni is currently a second year student pursuing B.Tech in aerospace engineering at Indian Institute of Technology Madras. He completed his class XII from Holy Cross S.S. School, Kapa in Raipur. With an impeccable academic record, he was the school topper in class XII with 93.4%. He is very interested in the field of aerospace and hopes to become a space scientist.

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Ayush Rai

Ayush describes himself as a goal-oriented person who always tries to plan a roadmap and make its implementation more effective in order to achieve the goal. This is evident from his success in various internships and projects over the years. With a 10 CGPA in class X, 96.2% in class XII and 8.2 CPI at IIT Kanpur so far, he has not let his disability come in the way of academic excellence. Further, despite hearing challenges, he has actively discharged responsibilities involving logistical supervision and communication. For instance, he was a successful events manager at ‘Techkriti’ organized at IIT Kanpur which is regarded as one of the largest technical fests. He is also active in university administrative affairs, and served as a student representative. Ayush is interested in diverse fields-from machine learning to mechanical engineering-and continues to learn more.

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Nibin Mathew

Nibin Mathew is a Master of science student in Digital Society at International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) Bangalore. After completing his undergraduate studies from the University of Calicut, he joined the Indian Railways for a short stint. As a visually challenged student, he faced challenges when wanting to study sciences and did not have access to any resources. However, he did not let this hinder the pursuit of his passion, and developed his own innovative solutions to manage the inaccessibility in science courses and presented these at the State Science Fair in Kerala which were well-appreciated.Besides his interest in technology, Nibin also enjoys playing the violin, having cleared grade 3 from Trinity College Lendon this year. He is also involved in sound ball tennis, and is thus an all-rounder who is now passionate about human computer interaction research.

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Pankaj Saini

Pankaj is a 5th year student at Indian Institute of Technology Delhi pursuing a dual degree B.Tech./M.Tech. course in Computer Science. He is extremely passionate about the intersection of technology and social impact, and his award-winning innovations have been featured at various competitions including at IIM Ahmedabad, TISS Mumbai, APU Bengaluru etc. He has also been a Mentor in Robotics Club of IIT Delhi, where he guided and managed many teams. He has also participated in several summer camps aimed at solving real-world problems, including IIT-MIT Summer Camp, Indo-French STEAM school, Rural Innovation Program, among others.

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Priyank Dubey

Priyank completed his bachelors degree in mechanical engineering in 2014 and was immediately hired by a popular public company in India, but was later turned down due to disability. However, he did not accept this, and continued to fight back. This resolute led him to securing 98.91 percentile in GATE Exam for post-graduate engineering education in 2018. He joined in as a student at IIT Kanpur and is currently pursuing M.Tech. in industrial and management engineering. With a keen interest in data analytics and data science, he completed an internship this summer to get practical experience, and is looking forward to learning more about the field.

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R Sai Harshini

R Sai Harshini is a 4th year dual degree(B Tech + M Tech) student in computer science department in IIT Madras. She loves programming and technology. She was born and brought up in Chennai and completed her schooling from DAV Girls Senior Secondary School, Gopalapuram, Chennai till class X. With a CGPA of 10 in class X and a 95.4% in class XII, she is a recipient of the NTSE(National Talent Search Examination) Scholarship in class XII as well as the KVPY (Kishore Vaigyanik Protsahan Yojana) fellowship with All India Rank of 417 (out of 1,00,000 applicants) in SA Stream in General Category. She also successfully qualified the National Standard Examinations in Chemistry and Astronomy in class XII and was selected to compete in the Indian National Chemistry Olympiad and Indian National Astronomy Olympiad. Given her interest in computer science, she started coding in class IX and have participated and cleared Zonal Informatics Olympiad. She is very passionate about competitive programming and regularly participates in coding competitions on platforms such as Codeforces, Codechef, Hackerrank, Leetcode, etc. Apart from academics, she also likes playing chess, reading books, listening to music and playing keyboard. In fact, she was a state-level chess player when she was in school and she regularly plays in college. Having interned at Google and Microsoft, she continues to explore her interest in technology.

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Rudraksh Agarwal

Rudraksh is currently pursuing computer science and engineering at Birla Institute of Technology, MESRA. He is interested in learning Data Science. Outside of his technical interest, he is extremely active in co-curricular activities, and is currently leading two teams-his college technical fest "Pantheon" and a Student Ambassador Program under Viacom 18 network. He is represented his district in Table tennis state level tournaments, and have also won several quizzes and debates at college level. He has also been an active volunteer with NSS.

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Shreya Kacholia

Shreya Kacholia is a 2nd year undergraduate in Computer Science at IIT Kanpur. She completed her schooling from Subodh Public School, Jaipur. With a CPI of 9.2/10 in her 1st year (2018-19), 90.8% in CBSE 12th board (2017-18) and 10 CGPA in 10th board (2014 -15), she has consistently been an extremely meritorious student. She also cleared the Kishore Vaigyanik Protsahan Yojana (KVPY) stage 2 in 2017-18 organised by the Dept. of Science and Technology, Government of India. She has a keen interest in programming, machine learning (specifically deep learning) and web development. She was also included in top 1000 candidates selected after round 1 of Flipkart Grid 2019(machine learning hackathon). She is an all rounder, and has participated and won competitions in diverse fields-from drawing to public speaking to spots-and has been bestowed upon with All Rounder Award twice in her school. She currently holds the positions of secretary for debating society, alumni relations and Entrepreneurship cell at IIT Kanpur. One of the most difficult times for her was during her first year course engineering drawing in university, when due to her visual impairment, she was unable to see clearly the thin lines she was expected to draw. However, this experience taught her the need to figure out workarounds by herself and be creative and resourceful. She hopes to continue to use this mindset in the future as well.

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Shubham Jain

Shubham was born in Sikar, a small town in Rajasthan. At the age of 5, he moved to Guwahati, Assam with his parents. A sense of accomplishment and fulfillment are his primary motivational factors for pursuing matters of his interest. This has driven him to actively take part in various competitive & non-competitive events since his younger days. Currently a third year mechanical engineering student at IIT Madras, he is the Design Lead of Team Anveshak, the Mars Rover team of IIT Madras. He built and fabricated a multi-functional & semi-autonomous rover for University Rover Challenge and Indian Rover Challenge. This has given him the opportunity to represent the institute at University Rover challenge 2018 at Utah, USA. At present, the team owns the title of being the best rover in India backed by the first position in Indian Rover Challenge 2019 held at Manipal. As a product designer, he has also developed a working prototype of an Automated Cleaning Bot. It is a mobile vehicle for floor sanitization and lavatory sterilization. For this, he was awarded a silver medal at Inter IIT Tech Meet 2018. His zeal for solving industrial problems has motivated him to work with Sina Mobility, Debrique Creative Labs & Bosch Limited on their real world problems.

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V Bharathan Mudaliar

Bharat is a final year BE Computer Science student at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. In his 2nd year of BE, he was introduced to Vision Aid which conducts introductory Python courses for the visually impaired. Since then, he has stayed on with the organisation and is currently a TA, helping other visually impaired students to learn programming. He is extremely passionate about online learning and has completed several courses on Python, Machine Learning and Deep Learning from some of the best universities in the world including MIT and Stanford. Having interned with startups before in various capacities, he has recently developed a passion for web development and is wanting to explore full stack web development.

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