City boy receives gold medal from President

AMRITSAR: At a time when Punjab youths are in news for wrong reasons Amritsars Saksham Sharma has hit the headlines by bagging gold medal from President Ram Nath Kovind for the best academic performance during the 51st annual convocation of the Indian Institute of Technology IIT Kanpur

Updated At : 06:45 AM Jun 30, 2018 IST

Saksham Sharma (left) receives medal from President Ram Nath Kovind at the IIT, Kanpur. Tribune photo

GS Paul

Tribune News Service

Amritsar, July 29

At a time when Punjab youths are in news for wrong reasons, Amritsar’s Saksham Sharma has hit the headlines by bagging gold medal from President Ram Nath Kovind for the best academic performance during the 51st annual convocation of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur.

Ranked first among 830 students, he scored Cumulative Grade Point Average (CGPA) 10/10 in the eight semesters during the four-year Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) course. Expressing his joy, Saksham said that the President specifically acknowledged his background. “He asked me ‘kahan se ho' (Where are you from?) When I replied ‘Amritsar se’ (from Amritsar), he immediately retorted as ‘Punjab ka naam roshan kar rahe ho’ (You are bringing fame to Punjab). It was the happiest moment of my life. Later, more excitement was to see my picture with him on the official tweeter account of the President of India bearing a very inspiring message," he said.

Saksham´s father Dr Suman Sharma is a veterinary officer in the state and mother Anupama Sharma a teacher at Kendriya Vidhalaya-1. His younger brother Anubhav Sharma is just preparing to enter college.

“Out of curiosity, I searched online about the recipients of President’s gold medal. What I could find was that Saksham was the first one from Punjab in the last two decades to receive this honour”, said Dr Sharma.

Saksham did his schooling from local DAV School. In 2014, he got 10th place in All India Rank in Joint Entrance Examination (Mains) and was at 138th position among the 1.5 million candidates in Joint Entrance Examination (Advanced). His merit opened the door of IIT, Kanpur, for him.

As a part of curriculum, he got an opportunity to work as software engineering intern with Google Seattle team, only to end up receiving a return job offer. This was followed by another lucrative package offered by Microsoft in the US, but he chose to wait and watch.

“I don’t want to get impatient prematurely, looking at the fat package only. For a beginner, I understand that my movement and thought process could have been restricted in such a world fame multinational firm like Microsoft. It might have hampered my instinct to learn and experiment independently, so I turned down the offer. India is a fast growing and there’s no dearth of scope,” he said.

During his studies, Saksham also worked on several projects. As part of a team, they had developed two semi-autonomous robots capable of playing badminton on a standard size court.

He also mentioned about an intelligent tutoring system, a tool he and his classmates had developed which has simplified the computer learning procedure. “With the growing popularity of Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs), the automated components of education are boon for the weak students. The tool we have developed provides suggestions and tips for correction on its own by automatically detecting the solutions to identical programming. It is now going to be implemented in IIT Kanpur shortly”, he said.