MEETING Yugendran Rajaendran made me question my life choices and wish I'd applied myself more at school.
"I always have a plan," he declares with a grin. I didn't.
Back in those days, my plan consisted of going to school on time, getting my homework done (most times) and exchanging Richard Clayderman cassette tapes with my friends during recess. Studying was secondary and left to burning the midnight oil mere weeks before exams.
I didn't have a game plan in my mind. What did I want to be when I grew up? A writer. It took me decades to get there. I realise too late as I speak to this young prodigy that it's the lack of planning that led me bouncing between different career paths for a good couple of years.
Moments into meeting Yugendran, I conclude with dismay that I'm a lesson in caution in contrast to the smiling cherubic young man who is living proof that hard work and goal-setting can take you very far. If. You. Just. Applied. Yourself.
I sigh inwardly. Oh, to be young again.
Yugendran has been in the news portal during recent times for achieving an almost impossible dream. He's been accepted into the prestigious California-based Stanford University's Class of 2024.
Just how hard is it to get to Stanford? Let's put it this way: The school has an average four per cent acceptance rate, one of the lowest acceptance rates in the world.
In 2019 alone, 2,071 out of 47,452 applicants were admitted, making Stanford an extremely competitive university to get into with a very low chance of acceptance — even for students with the highest scores and grades.
Academically, it has exceptionally high requirements for admission test scores, generally admitting students who score in the top four per cent.
Getting accepted is certainly big news. Especially if you're a Klang boy with bigger dreams.
"Stanford had always been my first choice," he says quietly. "I applied to top universities in the US and the UK," he goes on to share matter-of-factly.
He applied to 15 universities, a scattershot approach that he says is fairly typical. Students are all too aware of the long odds against getting into any particular elite university.
"It was a crazy amount of work and stress doing all those essays by the deadline while keeping up with my course work," he confesses, wincing at the thought.
There were moments he wondered if his dreams were simply too big to achieve. "I've had sleepless nights," he shares candidly.
SMALL TOWN, BIG DREAMS
It's a sunny afternoon when I finally arrive at Yugendran's modest single-storey terrace house in Meru Road, Klang.
The ever-smiling 20-year-old greets me at his gate with a shy hello before leading me into the hall.
The furnishings inside his house are just as sparse as they are outside. But neatly arranged around the TV stand and the side table are trophies, gold cups and awards pointing to his stellar academic records achieved throughout his schooling years.
"Have you ever failed a subject?" I tease, half-hoping he'd say yes. Surely this boy has an Achilles heel I've yet to uncover. A slight frown creeps up his face. He doesn't reply immediately.
"No," he finally answers after a pause. The very idea of failing a subject seems preposterous. "I've always worked very hard," he explains quickly.
There's no trace of pride as he says that. "You enjoy studying," I offer. "No. I enjoy learning," he corrects me. Studying isn't fun, he concedes. "If you enjoy learning, you'll learn to unlock a much larger world of opportunities. I never get tired of learning."
His aptitude, he reveals, surfaced when he was just a toddler. His 12-year-old sister was studying the percentages when Yugendran (who was around three or four at that time) asked her what she was doing.
"My sister didn't dismiss me with the typical 'Go away. I'm busy!' remarks," he recalls.
Instead, she sat him down and taught him fractions. "She took the trouble to teach me clearly. Why she was using these mathematical steps. These made me more curious. I developed such a curiosity and an aptitude for learning," he says.
He has four older sisters and he's close to all of them. Two are in the medical field, one is studying pharmacy while the other is pursuing architecture. I'm impressed. There are certainly no slackers in this family, I note aloud half-enviously. What's the secret?
"My parents," he replies simply. "They have incredible work ethics."
His father has never taken a day off except for a mere two days in a year to celebrate Deepavali. The 57-year-old, who runs a mechanic shop in Kapar for more than 30 years, is typically at work that day. Yugendran's mother, a housewife, hovers anxiously in the background as we speak.
"Does she want a drink? Something to eat?" she asks him in Tamil. He looks at me quizzically. "Oh no!" I protest. Moments later, she places a bottle of mineral water and a bag of unopened potato chips on the table in front of me. Her hospitality is touching.
His parents never pursued their education after secondary school. If there's one overarching lesson from the past few decades of research on how to break the cycles of poverty, it's the power of parenting. And of education.
"I know the toll that being poor took on my parents; how they struggled at times to pay the bills; to give us the things that other children had while playing all the roles that parents are supposed to play. And I know the toll it took on me and my sisters," he says firmly, adding: "So I resolved that it was my obligation to break the cycle — that if I could be anything in life, I'd be the one to help others."
OVERCOMING CHALLENGES
But he also tells me wryly that he's aware that this is exactly the kind of story that underprivileged students are conditioned to write for college application essays.
But Yugendran doesn't quite follow the script.
"My college application essays focussed on solutions rather than the issues I faced as an underprivileged student," he insists.
He wrote on how he overcame those challenges and how thankful he was for those challenges he faced. Overcoming the odds, facing challenges head on are the ethos he lives by.
From a young boy, Yugendran dared to dream big dreams and more often than not, his grandiose ambitions were often questioned by his classmates.
"I told them I wanted to be a scientist, get accepted by top universities like Harvard and go on to be a philanthropist like Bill Gates," he recalls, grinning.
"I didn't really know back then why these universities were so reputable or what they could do for a student like me. I only knew them by reputation."
His thinking was simple: The better a university's reputation was, the easier it would be for him to secure a brighter future.
"If I was going to uproot my life, be subjected to a different culture and adapt to a new style of education, I needed to know it was going to be worth it," he insists firmly.
His friends thought that he was over-ambitious. "They thought my goals were extreme. How was a boy from Tamil primary school and a humble background going to achieve all that?" he muses.
It was difficult to stay motivated, he concedes. "When you start believing in the opinion of others, it's hard to stay focussed on the possibilities."
A motivational programme run by Teach for Malaysia called "Closing the Gap" changed his perspective.
This programme looks out for promising students from low-income families, and provides them with a personal mentor to teach, guide, and empower these students with the knowledge for them to reach their highest potential.
"The programme simply answered the question: 'What does a kid from a low-income background need in order to succeed?'" he explains.
Yugendran was paired with Bank Negara scholar Dhruva Murugasu who studied economics at Cambridge University.
"He really helped me recognise my potential," he says proudly. "He helped me chart my goals and design my career path. He had many friends at Cambridge whom he introduced me to. It was through them I realised I needed to select a university not by reputation alone, but by the opportunities they presented for me to develop myself further."
Shares Yugendran: "Dhruva encouraged me to hold on to my big dreams and that it didn't matter whether I succeeded or failed. What matters most is that I try."
REACH FOR THE STARS
He confesses that he was expecting a rejection slip from Stanford.
He'd already been accepted into 10 of those 15 universities he applied to, including the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), New York University (NYU), Columbia University, Yale University, Carnegie Melon University and King's College London.
"I'd secured unconditional offers from other universities, but Stanford remained my big dream. Yet I was preparing myself mentally for a rejection letter," he admits, grinning.
Heart beating fast, Yugendran waited just moments before he was to log in to his online A-levels classes to access the university portal on his computer.
"My class was scheduled at 11am. I accessed the university portal just five minutes earlier. When the balloons and confetti burst on my screen, I could scarcely believe it. I read: 'Congratulations, you have been admitted.' It was really unbelievable."
Did you enter your online class, pumping your fist in the air? I tease again.
The bookish Epsom College student just smiles. "I told my mother. And then I called up my guidance counsellor. She really helped me navigate through the complicated university application process," he replies.
There's something refreshingly disarming about the way he dismisses my compliment about him being gifted. "I'm not gifted. I'm hardworking!" The former student of High School Klang tells me that he worked extremely hard to secure his stellar results (11 A1s) during the SPM. He joined Epsom College Malaysia to pursue his A-levels after obtaining a Tune Libra scholarship from the ECM Libra Foundation, thanks to his impressive academic records.
"Is there anything you're not good at?" I ask pleadingly, and he chuckles. Adjusting his spectacles, he offers placatingly: "I really wasn't good at languages. I had difficulty expressing myself."
When he moved from a vernacular school to a kebangsaan (national) school, he had to adjust. "I found myself having to speak in languages I wasn't comfortable speaking. I feared people would judge me for the way I speak," he admits.
Did they? I ask. "I'm not sure," he says, brows furrowing. "I suppose I took it as a challenge. Because I wasn't good in languages, I worked harder." Whatever criticism received, Yugendran took them constructively.
"It drove me to improve," he surmises, shrugging his shoulders. "I watched a lot of English movies with subtitles. It helped improve my pronunciation and increased my vocabulary."
In the three months preceding his SPM, Yugendran worked even harder, putting in at least 6 to 7 hours a day to study. He also wrote at least three essays per day in Bahasa Malaysia, English and Tamil.
"I'd send them to the teachers in charge and they were very kind to mark them for me," he recalls, adding again: "Like I said, I'm not a gifted student. I just work very hard!"
So, is there even such a thing as a gifted child? It's a highly contested area. Prof Anders Ericsson, an eminent education psychologist at Florida State University, and co-author of Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, says that he doesn't think unique and innate talents are at the heart of performance.
Deliberate practice — that stretches you every step of the way, and around 10,000 hours of it — is what produces the expert. It's not a magic number. The highest performers move on to doing a whole lot more, of course, and, like Yugendran, often find their own unique perspective along the way.
Yugendran agrees. "It's not that I'm so smart; it's just that I work really, really hard. Most people say that it's the intellect that takes you far. They're wrong. It's character."
He lists the former premier of India, Dr APJ Abdul Kalam, as one of his heroes. As an aerospace scientist, Kalam worked with India's two major space research organisations — Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).
"He often spoke to children and the country's youth — inspiring them to think big in life," says Yugendran, smiling.
The aspiring scientist plans to take up a double major in Bioengineering and Mathematical and Computational Science.
"I hope to come back and contribute to the nation with policy making and ensuring that we have effective healthcare policies," he confides. He expresses his hope to work with the Malaysian health ministry in local healthcare policymaking someday.
"My goal is to help people," he explains. "Others have helped me and I'm grateful. It's all about paying it forward. I really want to make a difference."
Half a beat later, he asks: "Miss, can I add something else?" He takes his time before continuing: "I wish that more Malaysian students would take the trouble to dream big and apply to top universities. I don't think it's the case of not being capable. I mean, if I can do it… anyone who works hard can achieve the same or more. All you need is to have goals and work towards it!"
That's sage advice coming from the Klang boy. As he and his mother wave me off with smiles, I can't help but think ruefully of my schooling days. Yugendran has made me realise that the possibilities out there are really limitless.
Who knows what's in store for those who dream?
Asean scholarship programme
The ECM Libra Foundation recently launched an RM15 million Asean Scholarship programme to support 50 students across Asean nations.
The foundation will provide financial assistance in the form of scholarships, school and boarding fees, and six return flights a year to and from Kuala Lumpur, to low and middle-income families that are feeling the financial pressures from the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Asean Scholarship programme is divided into four categories where two of them are under the Asean Bright Sparks which offers full scholarship for the A-Level programme and the International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGCSE) programme.
The other two are the partial scholarship under the Asean Partial Academic Scholarship programme and the Asean Partial Leadership Scholarship programme
Applications for the ECM Libra Foundation can now be made by emailing an application to scholarships@ecmlibra.com.
Details at www.ecmlibrafoundation.com.