A student from IISER Pune tops the CAT 2021 with the help of YouTube video lectures
Chirag Gupta, a 21-year-old Ahmedabad resident, is one of 9 applicants who aced the Common Admission Test (CAT) 2021 with a perfect score. He is in his last year of the BS-MS programme at the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISER) in Pune, and his master's thesis is on a cross-regional study of water poverty. "At first, I was researching physics analysis, but a semester project on drinking water poverty hooked me on the subject." "I read extensively about the drinking water situation and chose to commit my time and energy to study on the subject, which is desperately in need of attention," he continued. Chirag's interest in analysis encouraged him to prefer becoming a member of IISER Pune over an IIT. "I took JEE Highly Developed in 2017 and achieved an all-India rank of 5064." Despite being qualified to enrol at IIT Kharagpur and BITS Pilani, I opted to pursue a dual degree at IISER because of the research atmospher...