By & large, past Board toppers have good lives. But looking back, many feel school education did not provide the foundation it claims to deliver. 

We conclude our series (Tracking India's Toppers ) by asking what they think of school several yrs after graduation
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When Shreyas Sudhaman, 22, the 2014 ICSE topper, went abroad for his undergraduate education in chemical engineering at Cockrell School of Engineering, University of Texas, Austin, he realised that school hadn’t quite equipped him with some key skills
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3.Many toppers wish someone had briefed them better on options available post-school, loan programmes, & helped them with choice of colleges & careers -- in the absence of which, many ended up majoring in conventional disciplines before discovering their real interest.

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For instance, Janvi Thosani (26), the ICSE national topper of 2010, wished she had studied Economics instead of sitting for CA exams.

“CA was mostly choice by elimination because I didn’t want to do medicine or engineering. I wish I knew doing economics was an option," she said

Research scientist Karuna Ganesh (37) acknowledges that her school life prepared her to “to be focused and goal-oriented”, but the curriculum that she worked hard to “rote learn” in the late nineties was mostly irrelevant to modern science

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16 years after Ganesh cleared her Class 10, the experience that Sougato Chowdhury (21), the ICSE topper of 2015, had in school wasn’t different.

“The essence of science is thinking critically, asking questions & testing out possible answers. This was never promoted,” he said.

Anika Agrawal, 23, the 2013 ICSE topper who is studying MS in Marine Biology at Texas A&M University, said, “I don’t remember a single thing I learned in Class 10 because it was all short-term memorisation. We should have been taught to reason out and not mug up.”

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Read the full story here: https://indianexpress.com/article/express-exclusive/school-toppers-india-cbse-icse-7124016/

This is the 3rd & final part of our four-month investigation (Tracking India's Toppers ) in which we tracked down 86 men & women who topped the Class 10 & 12 exams conducted by CBSE and CISCE from 1996 to 2015.

Here's Part 1: https://twitter.com/KhurafatiChopra/status/1343440209287909377?s=20

Link to Part 2: https://twitter.com/KhurafatiChopra/status/1343043645306355712?s=20

We have some of the topper voices on video too! Watch:

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Series edited by @umavishnu & @rajkamaljha.

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