Accident gives
Brooklyn student
head-start on
success Photo courtesy of Akhilesh Khakhar
Akhilesh Khakhar.
A BY JAIME DEJESUS brilliant Brooklyn student took a frightening injury and turned it
into amazing success in the classroom.
Seventeen-year-old Akhilesh Khakhar, a senior at Brooklyn
Technical High School, has created an award-winning learning
app that has not only helped other students improve their ACT
and SAT scores, but also helped him receive a perfect score of 36
on the ACT.
It all started, literally by accident, when Khakhar was a freshman. “I was
walking to school, and I slipped and fell on ice and was knocked out,” he
explained. “It turned out I had a concussion. After going through a couple of
months of physical therapy, when I came back to doing school work, I found
that it took much longer.”
The post-concussive symptoms actually impacted the way Khakhar studied
and after a couple of frustrating weeks, he realized there had to be a better
way.
“I read a bunch of research papers online, went to diff erent websites and
studied the psychology behind learning,” he recalled. “I learned that active
learning increases memory by three times. The major component of learning
is competition so I applied that directly to my tests in ninth grade. I competed
with my mom and I would lose every single time. Then I competed with my
friends and I would still lose, but over time I won more and more, and my test
scores refl ected this.”
It was also a much more fun way to study. “When you’re competing with
your friends, it balances the seriousness of learning and also the passion and
energy of competing,” he said.
This line of thinking led to his best idea yet in his rising student career. “The
biggest tests I could think of at the time were the SAT and ACT so I created
PrepUp, an SAT and ACT prep app,” he said. That itself took time and eff ort —
indeed, he took a 130-hour online course to help him design the app.
The Fort Greene resident started creating the app during his freshman year,
developed it as a sophomore, and beta-tested it during his junior year. He
fi nally soft launched the app this past April and found immediate success.
“I hadn’t put a single dollar into marketing or advertisement, but through
people searching for an app for these tests and people telling each other, it
got pretty good traction in the SAT prep community,” he said. “Within the last
three weeks, I actually had 2,000 downloads just from China, so it’s on its way
to becoming more viral than it has already.”
QNS.COM
12 WINTER 2017