Sarthak Ahuja

Q1. Please introduce yourself.

Hi, I’m Sarthak Ahuja. I am a current DP2 student at PSG and I have always found solace in creative innovation. Since the age of 10, I have driven social change to generate grassroots community impact by increasing access to essential services in education and healthcare. Quite peculiarly, I happen to have a folder in my computer brimming with “Start-up Ideas!”. With ideas stemming from AI-managed educational resource organisers to ocular disease detectors, I am continuously finding ways to make people’s lives easier through enterprise. 

Apart from having a restless personality that loves to innovate, I love engaging with people. I love working on projects with a team and believe that collaboration breeds creativity. I am someone who embraces diversity and has always gravitated towards positions where I can work with a team. This is evidenced through my desire to seek leadership roles. For me, leadership is about vision, resilience, and the ability to inspire others; it’s about making a tangible impact that transcends formal roles.

Besides this aspect of my life, I am passionate about video editing and animation: pursuits I have been dedicated to since the fall of 2019. I enjoy video editing to such an extent that in my free time, you could either find me scrolling through LinkedIn networking with people or editing videos. And of course, besides these two, you could find me working towards propelling many of my ventures to ‘greater’ heights.

Q2. How has your journey been at Pathways School Gurgaon.

My journey at Pathways School Gurgaon started in July 2015. I was 9. I strongly believe that the entrepreneurial and problem-solving mindset I have within me is a result of the schooling I’ve received. Whether it be Pathways’ pursuit of turning me into a compassionate world citizen or the IB continuum’s desire to see me turn into a young changemaker who helps create a better world, the person I am today is the result of these visions coming to fruition.

From the Primary Years Programme (PYP), I was involved in the PYP exhibition, where I tackled the issue of child labor by founding 'The Cure Movement.' This organization allowed me to teach mathematics and English to a cohort of over 35+ underserved children from a village. I carefully assessed each child’s unique needs, created personalized lesson plans, and raised funds to donate educational and humanitarian supplies to them and their families. They went on to see dramatic rises in their academic performance over time.

In the Middle Years Programme (MYP), my drive to create change deepened. For my MYP personal project, I developed 'Unravel,' an app designed to enhance the cognitive skills of young children through real-life-inspired activities. Unlike other cognitive training apps that use abstract games, Unravel focuses on equipping individuals with the mental agility need to excel in the real world. The app has over 600 downloads on the Google Play Store.

However, things took an interesting turn with the MYP design Portfolio in MYP 5 when I created GR8ER, the world’s first academic network for IB MYP students that is now used by over 1700 students from 87 different countries. GR8ER uses novel feed personalization technology to help students find the right content they seek, and an AI augmented system that matches tutees with ideal student tutors based on their strengths and weaknesses. Many of the tutors, core team members, and subject experts on-site are PSG students and working with each one has been an absolute delight. They all resonate with GR8ER’s vision and contribute towards educational leadership and student agency through peer-to-peer learning.

Now, as a DP2 student, I reflect on this incredible journey. The collaborative science projects in DP, requiring out-of-the-box thinking and innovative solutions, have further honed my problem-solving abilities. The entrepreneurial mindset fostered by the IB curriculum continues to thrive, driving me to seek out new challenges and solutions. Moreover, the leader that Pathways has birthed in me seeks avenues to inspire people; The GR8ER team for instance has 4 directors and several other team members working diligently on various delegated tasks while we all help each other grow by learning something new everyday. 

Each step of my educational journey, from PYP to MYP to DP, has honed my ability to solve problems. The IB continuum was not just about learning; it was about applying that knowledge to make a tangible difference in the world. I am currently working on another solution for the early and automated diagnosis of an ocular disease. Reflecting on my journey, I notice that the profound influence of the IB curriculum has shaped me into the thinker and problem solver I am today as well as the well-rounded individual that exemplifies most of the IB ATL skills and learner profiles. Moreover, my school, Pathways School Gurgaon, under the mentorship of learned mentors, instilled in me the attitude and the mindset I need to make a difference in today’s world. Our school’s motto: ‘Learn, Work, Play, Think, and Live’ supported me throughout in balancing my endeavours and making the most out of the time and resources!

Q3. What inspired you to create GR8ER, the global platform for MYP students to access personalized tutoring?

As mentioned earlier, the GR8ER (www.gr8er.live/) journey began as part of my MYP design portfolio, and its origin is both funny and ironic. For the MYP design portfolio, we were tasked with identifying a 'problem' that we had to develop a solution for. I've always been indecisive about starting long projects and reports, often waiting until I find the perfect topic. In this case, finding the right ‘problem’ seemed crucial. I began exploring issues within various communities and searched online for examples of problems addressed in past MYP portfolios. To my surprise, I found no substantial information about the MYP, let alone the MYP design portfolio.

Using this as a foundation, I channelled my research into the MYP student community. I realised that given the niche nature of the MYP curriculum with its distinct subjects, the ever-evolving academic framework with no fixed syllabus, and the sheer rarity of schools (less than 1900 globally), my peers and I were confronted with a significant lack of resources and an overflowing pool of misinformation online. With my mocks around the corner, I acknowledged that this problem persisted in various MYP subjects whether they be on-screen subjects like physics or extended mathematics, or off-screen subjects like the portfolios and the personal project. Post school hours, getting timely answers to our burning questions seemed like a formidable challenge whereas for various other curricula such as the DP, online sites were flooded with revision material, resources, and study content.

Deeply resonating with the struggles of the student community, I set out to build a beta version of GR8ER from scratch within five months. This free-to-use, crowdsourced platform has become an invaluable educational resource, guiding students towards the right materials and pairing them with tutors well-versed in MYP subjects. GR8ER’s mission, as the name suggests, is to enable students to achieve greatness in the eight subjects assessed in the final MYP eAssessments.

In my own MYP eAssessments, I achieved the highest number of 7s in our MYP batch of '23 (a perfect score in eight out of the nine subjects I appeared for). As the founder and head tutor at GR8ER, I uploaded over 90 of my personal notes and success secrets, which have now been viewed more than 23,400 times. Engaging with students on the site and providing them with timely, much-needed answers has become my forte. As part of GR8ER’s peer-to-peer tutoring, my team and I meticulously plan and help tutors create bespoke step-by-step lesson plans, defining clear objectives and goals for each tutee.

Despite having a team of over 40 tutors who collectively administer an average of 57+ hours of tutoring each month, I also teach various MYP subjects myself. We have observed that a significant portion of our traffic for peer-to-peer tutoring comes from underserved communities in Kenya, Ghana and Afghanistan. We are proud to provide these MYP students with customized tutoring tailored to their unique needs.

Q4. What are plans for the future?

We envision a future where the world’s IB MYP schools endorse GR8ER at an administrative level so that teachers can integrate the forum’s invaluable, peer-reviewed resources into their pedagogy. To take this a step further, we are also planning to onboard curriculum student experts (under the guidance of teachers) to craft resources for different learning levels, from introductory guides to advanced materials. The platform will continue to be powered by students, thus underlining the importance of student agency so that young people can deepen their intellectual engagement with the subjects in the roster.