Bhavya Shah

Some Lesser Known Facts About Bhavya Shah

• Bhavya Shah suffered from gradual retinal detachment from age 5 which led to a complete loss of vision in both eyes by the age of 12.

• He faced several challenges in his regular studies. Still, he continued his studies in the mainstream school with rehabilitation and assistive training from Xavier’s Resource Centre for the Visually Challenged (XRCVC) in Mumbai.

• He was ranked 13th in the World Robotics Olympiad (a global robotics competition) in 2015.

• In 2015, he secured 41st place in the National Financial Literacy Assessment Test conducted by the National Centre for Financial Education.

• Since 2016, he has shared his life experiences, creative compositions, and technical insights through his WordPress blog, Hiking Across Horizons.

• In 2016, he won gold, silver, and bronze medals in various categories at the Global IT Challenge (GITC) for Youth with Disabilities, a project by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP).

• In 2019, he was selected as the 6th best speaker at the World Schools Debating Championships (WSDC).

• In 2020, he created audio lessons on mathematical problems titled Math By Ears on his YouTube channel, aimed at visually impaired students.

• He ranked 9th in the 2022 Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl, an annual debate competition between universities in the United States of America.

• He has interned at several organisations including the World Bank Group as a Data Scientist and Meta as a Tech Ethics and Policy Fellow.

• He has volunteered services for various conferences and associations including AccessIndia as Chief Administrator (2015-2017), NVDACon Users and Developers Conference for South Asia as its chairperson (2016), and Students with Disabilities Task Force as its student representative (2022).

• In 2022, Bhavya received the Google Lime Scholarship for computer science students.

• He also won the BMO Capital Markets Equity Through Education Scholarship and Oracle Scholarship for Excellence in Computer Science in 2022.

• He also received the Lime Connect Fellowship Program For Students with Disabilities in 2022.

  

• Since 2022, he has worked part-time as the Oral Communication Tutor at the Hume Center for Writing and Speaking at Stanford University.

• In October 2024, he participated in the open mic show, India’s Got Latent, on YouTube.