Liberty’s Vivek Chhabria has a bright future

Vivek Chhabria

LIZ ROBERTSON

It would be an under­state­ment to say that Vivek Chhabria is busy.

This year the Olen­tangy Lib­erty High School senior is pres­i­dent of National Honor Soci­ety, co-president of stu­dent coun­cil and active in the Inter­act Ser­vice club where he vol­un­teers for a vari­ety of projects, such as trick or treat­ing for cans which will then be donated to Peo­ple In Need.

Vivek also vol­un­teers at the APPIO Med­ical Clinic through his tem­ple on Hyatts Road. Doc­tors in the Indian com­mu­nity vol­un­teer at the clinic where Vivek helps with fill­ing out med­ical forms and direct­ing patients; he some­times also shad­ows the doctors.

Indian dance is another area that keeps Vivek busy. He has been danc­ing since he was 8 or 9. He is now the dance cap­tain, where, in his sopho­more year, his group went to a national com­pe­ti­tion in Florida.

While he loves the com­pe­ti­tion, he said there is also char­ity and fundrais­ing work that go hand-in-hand with the art, with the dol­lars raised going to India. Vis­it­ing the coun­try him­self a cou­ple years ago, he spoke of the poverty he saw, adding it was good to be able to give back.

Vivek real­izes that he will have to pick and choose his vol­un­teer work while at col­lege, but he does plan to keep being involved — as well as con­tinue dancing.

He is now in the process of send­ing out his col­lege appli­ca­tions and essays to Ohio State Uni­ver­sity, Geor­gia Tech, Michi­gan, Illi­nois, Carnegie Mel­lon and his dream school, MIT.

He plans to major in engi­neer­ing, focus­ing on mechan­i­cal engi­neers in his under­grad­u­ate stud­ies and then go into bio­med­ical engi­neer­ing as he pur­sues his master’s degree and doctorate.

“My pas­sion is the med­ical field, but I spoke to a lot of engi­neers who said to choose the clas­sic engi­neer­ing fields,” Vivek said, as he explained his reasoning.

So Vivek decided to go with mechan­i­cal engi­neer­ing, then will spe­cial­ize in bio­med­ical for his master’s and doc­tor­ate degrees.

“I like to do research, but I also like to teach,” he said. With a pro­fes­sor­ship, he can do both.

His inter­est in engi­neer­ing began early in high school, when he real­ized he was bet­ter at math and sci­ence. He also attended an engi­neer­ing sum­mer camp at Ohio State which intro­duced him to all the aspects of the field. It was here he decided to focus on mechan­i­cal engineering.

He spoke excit­edly about intern­ships he held over the past sum­mer. Vivek sent resumes to 10 com­pa­nies, intern­ing at two.

For one, he worked in library ser­vices, research­ing top­ics — and even run­ning to OSU library every now and then — search­ing data­bases and more for the company’s engineers.

In his sec­ond intern­ship, he helped work on a new tread­mill for car­diac stress tests. This one, which runs on water-based hydraulics, allows patients to keep their heart rate up before their MRI was run. Vivek helped by actu­ally run­ning on the tread­mill, and also came up with a method for a speed sen­sor for the project.

He explained that bio­med­ical engi­neer­ing can be any­thing from devel­op­ing new sur­gi­cal tech­niques to new scalpels to new prosthetics.

“It’s a very broad field,” Vivek said.

He also attended a sum­mer camp at OSU on com­puter programming.

“It’s impor­tant to be a good pro­gram­mer,” he said. At the camp for two weeks, he also got a taste of being on his own.

Apple is one com­pany he has always wanted to work for.

Vivek said every­thing in the com­pany is focused on innovation.

“I want to make a dif­fer­ence. I want just to be able to inno­vate,” he said.

Eliz­a­beth Ale­jan­dro is the advanced place­ment psy­chol­ogy teacher and NHS advi­sor at Lib­erty. She had Vivek in her psy­chol­ogy class and knows him through his work as pres­i­dent of NHS.

“I have seen the strong com­mit­ment he has to all that he is involved in. Vivek has par­tic­i­pated in many of our ser­vice projects and is such a great leader and is always will­ing to lend a hand with a cheer­ful atti­tude,” she said.

She adds that Vivek “is such a bright, hard work­ing, friendly, pos­i­tive and trust­wor­thy indi­vid­ual who is a real plea­sure to work with. He has excel­lent peo­ple skills and is kind to all who are around him. Vivek is great with lead­ing a group and work­ing with oth­ers. When I had him in class I daily had stu­dents want­ing to work with Vivek because he is so good at explain­ing mate­r­ial when other stu­dents are unsure. He is an excel­lent teacher and group mem­ber and is very hum­ble and gen­tle when talk­ing to others.”

Vivek said that many think it’s great he is pres­i­dent of all these clubs. But he humbly attrib­utes his suc­cess to great advi­sors, much as he does his high grades to the help and encour­age­ment of his parents.

“I make the agen­das. It’s not like I do every­thing,” he said. “It is the peo­ple around me that make it all possible.”

Vivek uses ten­nis, where he is cap­tain of the school team, as his out­let for stress. It is a sport he has played since sev­enth grade.

He advises oth­ers to “do what you like and work hard. Work­ing hard is the key. Try to avoid seniori­tis. I think you have to work hard the entire way through. Stay orga­nized, work hard and try not to stress.”

With every­thing that Vivek Chhabria is doing, it would be sur­pris­ing if he did not find life stress­ful some­times. While he admits there is some stress, he said it feels good to be a senior, and that he is excited to be going off to col­lege next year.

While Vivek has long range plans for his future, he also has short term goals as well. Such as the tra­di­tional Thanks­giv­ing din­ner for seniors at Der Dutchman.

“Look­ing for­ward to it,” he said with a broad smile, “I hear the food is good.”

Vivek is the son of San­jay and Nina Chhabria of Powell.

Posted by Liz Robertson on Oct 29 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.