Meet India’s youngest IITian, cracked IIT-JEE at 13, had no formal schooling till Class 8, his name is…, he is now…
IIT-JEE is one of the most competitive exams in India. Several students start preparing for the exam after their Class 10 examination. Their sole aim is to get admission into the prestigious IITs in the country. But what if we tell you that there is one boy who cracked the JEE exam at just 12 years old? It is not a myth or a fiction. Well, Satyam Kumar of Bakhorapur village in Bhojpur district in Bihar cracked the JEE examination and became the youngest IITian in the country.
Who is India’s youngest IITian? Where did he grow up, and what was his family background?
In 2012, when children his age were learning primary mathematics in middle school, Satyam made history by achieving an All India Rank(AIR) of 8137 on his first attempt at the IIT-JEE. However, his ambitions were even bigger. In 2013, he sat for the exam again and topped the examination. He scored 292 marks out of 360 in the JEE Mains exam. He secured an AIR of 679 in JEE Advanced at the very young age of 13. Before him, the record was held by Sahal Kaushik, who achieved this milestone at the age of 14. However, it is reported that Satyam appeared for the JEE exam twice.
What made his journey unique?
Satyam was born on July 20 to Sidhnath Singh, a poor farmer. According to his LinkedIn profile, he took admission at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, where he pursued a BTech-MTech dual degree in Electrical Engineering. In 2019, he pursued a Doctor of Philosophy PhD, ECE at the University of Texas at Austin.
What was Satyam Kumar’s IIT JEE rank?
After finishing his studies, Satyam worked as a research intern at Telecom Bretagne. Additionally, he worked as a teaching assistant at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. In October 2017, he worked as a research assistant at ETH Zurich. As per his LinkedIn profile, he worked as a machine learning intern at Apple in 2023, graduate research assistant at the University of Texas at Austin from 2019 to 2024. At present, he works as a machine learning systems research engineer.
“Research Interests: Deep Learning, Brain-Computer Interface, Speech Recognition, Time-Series Analysis, Human-Robot Interaction, Neuroengineering,” reads his LinkedIn bio. It is to be noted that Kumar appeared for the JEE exam twice. At first, his rank was 8137. Not satisfied with his result, he once again appeared for the exam, thus obtaining an AIR of 679.
As per the PTI report (2013), Satyam’s uncle, Pashupati Singh, a clerk at Veer Kuer Singh College, stated that Satyam had no formal schooling till Class 8th owing to the family’s financial struggles and the lack of adequate educational resources at the local government school.
Satyam started his academic journey in 2007, when he enrolled the Class 8. After passing the Rajasthan board, he took admission at Modern School in Kota. According to his uncle, Pashupati Singh, the principal of the school, R.K. Verma took full responsibility to pay for all of Satyam’s educational and coaching fees in preparation for the IIT entrance exam, as per the report.
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