JEE Advanced 2020: Ludhiana’s Gurpreet secures AIR 23, next stop IIT Bombay

Gurpreet Singh Wadhwa, 19, a resident of Ludhiana’s Rishi Nagar, has secured All India Rank (AIR) 23 in the Joint Entrance Examination (Advanced), results of which were declared on Monday. He scored 310 out of 398 marks in the examination held on September 27.

His eyes set on becoming a computer engineer, he now wants to pursue BTech from IIT Bombay. The 19-year-old had earlier scored AIR 126 in JEE Main with 99.992 percentile marks.

“Coaching, along with self-study and the daily guidance of my teachers helped me achieve this score,” said Gurpreet.

Besides taking coaching from a Chandigarh-based institute for the past two years, he put in seven to eight hours a day to self-study, starting at 8am. “I practiced tests till 11am and then devoted three to four hours to self-study. In the evening, I attended discussion classes with my teachers to clear my doubts,” he said on his efforts to secure admission in an IIT.

For focus to achieve his goal, he said, he refrained from using social media and even stayed away from his smartphone to avoid distraction and waste of time.

“Yet, this rank was not possible without the support of my parents and teachers,” said Gurpreet, an alumnus of Bhavan Vidyalaya, Panchkula, who had scored 97.8% in CBSE Class 12 board examinations.

His parents are Gurmeet Singh, who runs a garment export company, and Gurveen Kaur, a chemistry teacher at Kundan Vidya Mandir School, Civil Lines.

“We are proud of our son, who has fulfilled our dreams by giving his best with the blessings of his grandparents and teachers. We are extremely thankful to his teachers, who continued to work hard during the pandemic,” said the ecstatic father.

Gurpreet also has National Talent Search Exam and Kishore Vaigyanik Protsahan Yojana scholarships to his credit. He had also qualified for the Indian National Physics Olympiad and the Indian National Chemistry Olympiad. Besides, he was the only student to clear the Regional Mathematical Olympiad in Class 10 from Ludhiana in 2018.

He was one of the two students selected from Punjab for the Dhruv Tara Award conferred by Vice-President Venkaiah Naidu and HRD minister Ramesh Pokhriyal ‘Nishank’. The award had taken him to the ISRO headquarters for a two-week programme.