In India, we see the people where most of the girls are discouraged from studying. But, a 15 year old girl Sushma completed her Master’s Degree in Microbiology from Lucknow University where her father is a sanitation worker with first class marks and became the youngest Indian to enroll as the Ph.D student at Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University (BBAU). Here is the success story of Sushma who had entered the Limca Book of awards in 2007 as she is the youngest student to clear the class 10th exam.

At the age of 5 in 2005, Sushma was enrolled into Class IX at the UP Board-affiliated St Meera’s Inter College. Two years later, in 2007, Sushma was recognised by the Limca Book of Records as the “youngest student” to pass class X when she was 7 years, 3 months and 28 days old. However, she took three years to complete 12th class as she went to Japan upon an invitation “where she stood first in an IQ test comprising people up to 35 years of age,” says her father Bahadur. In 2010, after clearing Class XII and wanting to be a doctor and hoping “to give something back to the society,” Sushma sat for the Uttar Pradesh Combined Premedical Test (CPMT).

But CSJM University, Kanpur, which had conducted the test, withheld her result because minimum age for enrolling in MBBS is 17 years. Wise and way matured for her age, Sushma told  in an interview, “A person should always be judged by his or her talent and potential, not by age. I desperately wanted to become a doctor, but now I have to wait till I turn 17 — it’s a huge disappointment for me.” In the meantime, she enrolled into B.Sc at Lucknow university and then she had an interest in Botany and cleared the examination in 2013.

She graduated from the college where her father is a sanitation, worker. Sushma’s father Tej Bahadur, 51, was a daily wage worker until BBAU Vice-Chancellor Dr R V Sobti helped him secure a sanitation supervisor job on campus, so that he could support his daughter and rest of the family.

In her family, Sushma is not only the girl who did the miracles her elder brother completed his BCA at the age of 14. Her father believes that three-year-old Ananya will be “the brightest among the three (children).

Sushma in an Interview told that “I now want to pursue Ph.D., perhaps in agricultural microbiology,”. “I’m interested in this field, I was especially drawn to it when we had to do fieldwork in the fourth semester, or when we would have to do lab work such as isolate Rhizobium bacteria in roots of leguminous plants,”

Sushma is an inspiration to all the students who are alike and we should respect her for all her achievements in such a young age.