At Georgetown University in Qatar's New Student Convocation in Doha last week, one student was chosen to carry the class banner on behalf of the incoming Class of 2030. It went to Adarsh Kumar, from Champaran, Bihar. The class he was representing is not an easy one to join. Qatar Tribune reported that the 150 admitted students came through a 9.4% acceptance rate, that every one of them is bilingual, and that more than half speak three or more languages. Forty two nationalities are represented in the batch. Six years earlier, Adarsh was a 14 year old standing outside a coaching institute in Kota he could not afford to enter. Adarsh grew up in Champaran with unreliable electricity and patchy internet, raised by a single mother who worked cleaning homes to pay for his schooling. At some point she spent her savings on a laptop. That machine is the hinge of the whole story. He used it to teach himself to code and to read his way into the world of building things. By 13, during the pandemic, he had co-founded Mission Badlao, a community outfit that helped secure land for a government school, facilitated more than 2,000 COVID vaccinations, distributed menstrual health products and ran tree plantation drives. At 14 he left for Kota with Rs 1,000, chasing the standard escape route handed to every ambitious teenager in Bihar: IIT coaching, an engineering seat, a way out. The coaching was unaffordable. He did not go home. He worked the library's free wifi instead, cold emailing mentors until enough of them wrote back to turn into internships, programmes and time spent shadowing founders. He then sat his Class 10 board exams independently and won a full scholarship worth Rs 30 lakh to Jayshree Periwal International School in Jaipur, one of India's stronger IB schools. He was the first student there to receive it. He then helped three more students win the same support. That pattern, take the opportunity and immediately widen the door behind you, is the through line of everything since. In 2023, at 16, Adarsh launched Skillzo, a platform connecting underserved students to mentorship, scholarships and skills training. It was built around the specific gap he had lived through: talent with no route into the right rooms. Skillzo has now worked with more than 20,000 students, many of whom have gone on to win scholarships, start ventures and place in national competitions. Alongside it he served as CMO of Bihar Chhatra Sansad, the state's largest student led policy forum, engaging over 1,500 young people and raising about $36,000 for student initiatives. He also became the youngest ever Google Youth Advisor. In September 2025, that record won him the Chegg.org Global Student Prize, a $100,000 award run with the Varkey Foundation as the student counterpart to the $1 million Global Teacher Prize. He was selected from close to 11,000 nominations across 148 countries and accepted the award in London. He is the first Indian to win it. The prize has run since 2021 and pr
