Reality TV Lets Indian Student Study Abroad

Britain's Earl Of Warwick University arrived at a novel manner to pull a top foreign pupil from India. Working in concurrence with the British High Commission, Earl Of Warwick offered a four-year engineering course of study to the victor of an Indian world television show called Airtel Scholar Hunt.

The program, described in a BBC-TV news characteristic as "a cross between The Apprentice and Mastermind," offered as its expansive award an instruction abroad, with an estimated worth of around 45,000 lbs sterling. Predictably, one thousands of rivals applied to contend. After eight hebdomads of quizzes, interviews and exams, the victor was chosen. The desired award went to 18-year-old Arvin Aradhya, of Delhi.

Interviewed by the BBC on the Earl Of Warwick campus, an obviously excited Mr. Arahdya first praised the English weather. Then he went on to state what it was that he liked most about Warwick: "the diversity." He made it clear that he was talking about academic diversity: "having all Fields of learning on the same campus."

For Warwick, as of import was achieving a diverseness of the pupil population. The University's Dr. Tony Prince called the reality-TV venture "a new and novel manner to pull students" - in the lawsuit of North American Indian students, a grouping that British People universities are at striving to draw, and to pull away from the competition in the United States.

The endeavor tapped into deepest aspirations the new Indian center social class for their children. An instruction abroad is 1 of the trademarks of those aspirations, and an all-expenses-paid one was certain to open fire the Indian imaginativeness - and did

Young Mr. Aradhya's ain aspirations are, literally, "for the stars." His aspiration is to be an astronaut. Given his superb start, and the lift his triumph on Scholar Holman Hunt have given him, there's every ground to anticipate the immature scholarly person to accomplish blast-off.