Indian student to begin Gates scholarship at Cambridge University
An Indian student is all set to begin her PhD course in Earth Sciences looking at climate change in the Indus Valley at the University of Cambridge, after being awarded a prestigious Gates Cambridge scholarship in recognition of both her academic achievements and social leadership.
Yama Dixit is one of 90 new scholars starting at the University later this month. The scholarship programme was established in 2000 by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to enable outstanding graduate students from outside the United Kingdom to study at the University. They are awarded on the basis of a person's intellectual ability, leadership capacity and desire to use their knowledge to contribute to society. She was studying environmental sciences at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). At JNU she got a lot of encouragement from one of her lecturers, Professor V. Rajamani, who supervised her Masters project. She credits him as being a key reason for her winning a coveted Junior Research Fellowship (JRF) in Earth Sciences. This in turn led to her getting to the second round of interviews for the prestigious Shyam Prasad Mukherjee scholarship.  In April, she and some friends formed a Society called "Think for All" to encourage people to do voluntary work to help marginalised members of society. Within JNU she has also been active in promoting public health and environmental issues.As councillor of the School of Environmental Sciences, she arranged cleaning drives, no smoking campaigns and organised a week-long celebration for Earth Day involving local schoolchildren in painting and collage-making competitions on environment-related issues. All of this, a broader outlook made her a perfect candidate for a Gates Cambridge scholarship, but she only found out about the programme by surfing the Internet. Add Comment CommentsYou may also like to read
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