The goal of the IC3 Movement is to empower every school to run a robust, fully functioning career and college counseling department. With this in mind, focus is placed on student development in an effort to help students make best-fit higher education and career decisions. Aligned with IC3’s mission, the IC3 Regional Forums enable hundreds of schools that have limited resources for training of their principals, teachers and counselors, the opportunity for learning and new knowledge creation.

Inspired by some of the students we have met at the host schools during the 2019 IC3 Regional Forums this year, we are excited to announce a new campaign called #StudentExcellence to showcase their unique accomplishments. As we continue on this journey, we look forward to meeting many new students from different schools around the world.

Meet Pranav Nutalapati

Our first student is Pranav Nutalapati, grade 11, from Legacy School in Bengaluru, India.

IC3: Are you part of any clubs at Legacy School?

Pranav: Yes, I am the leader of the tech team at my school. We are a student team that attempts to integrate tech into everyday life wherever possible. We represent our school in various tech events, such as the OSI Days, and participate in hackathons and contests such as HP Codewars and the IBM Bluemix Hackathon. We also take care of any computer-related faults and we handle most of the events at school, from the weekly assemblies to the larger sports days and annual days.

I’m also an avid gamer and participated in Impressions 2018 in DPS North with four friends from school.

IC3: What are some current projects you’re working on in school?

Pranav: For the IC3 Regional Forum that was hosted at our school, my tech team worked on automating and simplifying the delegate registration process. Rather carrying IDs and paperwork, delegates used a QR code on their phones.

My tech team is also experimenting with multiple affordable, low-budget ways for our school to live stream events to allow parents who weren’t able to make it to still enjoy our performances.

I'm also part of my school's AI club, which brings students up to speed on the latest developments in artificial intelligence. We have debates about whether the world needs AI and the moral dilemmas that it poses. We also give other students a boost in starting to develop their own projects using platforms like the TensorFlow Playground.

For the third year in a row, we used the Student Council Election app, a digitized way for students to elect representatives. Previously, our school used ballots slips that had to be manually counted by teachers -- a process that took an entire week. Now, by using this app, students vote on their iPads and the results can be out the very next day!

Last year, we also introduced the Student Feedback app, an easy way for students to give feedback about each teacher for each subject. Plus, this app is able to draw visualizations of the feedback, such as pie charts and word clouds. Similar to the Student Council Election app, the results are tallied instantly, saving teachers and management hours of work.

At Senior Sports Day last year, we introduced a digital scoreboard, complete with animations and a food menu. It added a modern touch to our sports day and gave it more flavor. It was also easier to maintain than classic flip cards.

A project that I am working on independently is an intelligent school suite, a school information management system. Most school management systems that I’ve used in the past have not been very user-friendly. So, I started work on my own school suite, with the intent to make it extremely easy to use for teachers, management, parents and students. Inspired by the insightful analytics provided by YouTube Studio, one feature that I’m investing a lot of effort in is meaningful statistics, so at a glance, teachers can know which students need help, students can see their own growth over time, and management can see how teachers are performing.

IC3: What are you interested in studying once you finish high school?

Pranav: I’m interested in pursuing further education in Artificial Intelligence. It’s a field that interests me greatly and is likely to be the most influential field of our generation. I want to bring AI closer to day-to-day life, rather than being reserved for corporations to crunch data.

IC3: What country are you most interested in going to college in?

Pranav: I would love to pursue my passion for AI at one of the top universities in the U.S.

IC3: What do you do in your free time away from school?

Pranav: I love spending my free time programming. Every day I try to squeeze in at least three hours working on some project or just for exploration. My current specialty is web development, but I also have experience in Python and have dipped my toes in Java. Stack Overflow is one of my most regularly visited websites. It’s such a nice community of like-minded programmers and it presents me with so many more problems than I could have experienced by myself. I also frequent CodeSignal for its challenges and tournaments. I’ve more recently started following the articles on OpenAI’s website as well.

Apart from that, I play the piano and I recently started reading books regularly again. In the past two weeks, I finished reading "The Accidental Billionaires" by Ben Mezrich and “Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell.

IC3: What topic or career industry interests you most?

Pranav: Hands down, anything Computer Science. But to be more specific, I love programming. The continuous problem solving that you have to keep doing really keeps my mind focused.

AI is something that I became interested in more recently, since March of last year, after doing a four-month internship at an AI startup. It’s definitely something that draws my attention a lot more, and since it’s a relatively new field, things are always changing.