Learning from real tales

It’s a struggle that every teenager is bound to go through. Figuring out the answer to, “What will I be when I grow up?” and then making the right choice. With a plethora of promising and interesting career streams available out there, how does one choose what suits them best?

Rohan Gupta, a 17-year-old student from The International School Bangalore has a solution. Going through the same struggles himself, he believes that getting to know about your senior’s struggles and success stories might be a push in the right direction. He now heads Our Stories; A platform for people to come onstage and open up about their journey to teenagers who are looking for inspiration.

He conducted his first event on Sunday with an audience of 20 students and four speakers, and Rohan is thrilled to take the initiative forward and help more and more of his peers. In a chat with Deccan Chronicle, Rohan shares about the initiative and more.

“I felt that there was a lack of peer-to-peer communication among students. It is the best way of learning and collecting real experiences. Recently, in our school, there were students who got accepted into colleges that we aspire to find ourselves in. They gave us talks about what they did, and how they managed to make it into their dream colleges. I found it way more useful than any YouTube video or Google tips. It was more personal and practical. Even after doing some research online, people have doubts as to how to go about things. I was struggling to figure out what I should do myself at this point of time,” recalls Rohan.

Our Stories was started last year by Karan Khanna, a graduate, who went to colleges and held events and heard positive reviews about the same. Rohan is taking the initiative forward with the help of his counsellor Shaista Baljee, the owner of Ivy Aspire. The event that was conducted on Sunday was the first of its kind; and they plan on carrying it forward, doing it once every six weeks or so. The first session was designed to be up, close and personal.

To be leading such a task was a learning experience for Rohan too. “There were a lot of things I got to learn and experience myself; Keeping the flow of the event, keeping the audience engaged throughout with Q&A sessions, getting in touch with people, finalising the venue details, logistics and a lot more other things. And the key to balancing my academics, and Our Stories was managing time efficiently,” says Rohan who enjoys playing video games which help in developing strategies and coding. He is also taking a course in machine learning.