NEET UG 2024: Sristi Saha cleared the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test Undergraduate (NEET UG) 2022 and is pursuing her MBBS from AIIMS Rishikesh. The 20-year-old is from West Bengal’s Cooch Behar. Her dream to become a doctor was sown by her father who himself could not pursue the medical field due to financial constraints. She was enrolled in a local NEET UG tuition at her hometown in Class 11. Childhood, demotivating comparison with sister and NEET preparation Saha, who also has an elder sister, has been focused on her studies since her childhood. However, the teachers at school compared Saha to her sister who was a bright student. This often demotivated her as she hated the constant comparison. Further, she recalls her batchmates were judged based on exam results but she was evaluated based on how her sister performed in the same exam the previous year. This lowered her self-confidence in her childhood. This comparison occurred solely between relatives and at school, she added. "Both of us sisters have gotten equal support from our parents," Saha said. Her sister, Sreenwanti Saha, is a final-year MBBS student at North Bengal Medical College and is two years older than her. After completing her Class 10, she chose four subjects in Class 11 – physics, chemistry, biology and math. However, in Class 11, she struggled to decide how and where to prepare for the competitive exams due to a lack of good institutes in her hometown. As she started her Class 12, the Covid-19 pandemic struck the country, disrupting everything including the exam schedule. However, she used the lockdown phase to focus on NEET UG preparation. NEET UG 2021, Covid “I studied diligently from morning till night during my preparation,” Saha said adding that she was confident in her preparation and believed that she would succeed in her first attempt. Her daily routine involved waking up early, revising and going through the NCERT textbooks, solving multiple choice questions and taking mock tests. She even reduced the time spent with family members to a minimum. However, she tested positive for Covid just four days before the exam, so much so that her health deteriorated to the extent that she could not sit for the exam, causing her to miss it. Depression, next attempt She felt miserable after she missed appearing for her NEET UG 2021 attempt. Her sadness was aggravated when she started rereading the same textbooks for her NEET UG attempt next year. “I was so sure that I would not be reading the same NCERT after September 12, but as I missed appearing on the exam, and I was going through my textbooks again, I felt so sad that I cried looking at the textbooks,” Saha said. “My sadness evolved into depression. I started taking antidepressants for two months straight. I started questioning why it happened to me only,” she added. "At the time, my parents encouraged me to proceed forward. Therefore, I resumed my preparations," Saha said adding that she then joined a NEET UG test series to motivate herself. "I used to follow the timetable set for the test series, appear at the tests every weekend and analyse what went wrong in the test." Since she chose math as well in her Class 11 and Class 12, she also appeared for the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE Main) in 2021. After her counselling, she got a seat at NIT Bhopal in the computer science engineering branch. Although everyone advised her to take the admission without wasting a year in NEET UG, her passion for pursuing MBBS made her not take up engineering. Saha is also a content creator and has over 50,000 followers on her YouTube channel. Her channel has videos on NEET preparation, USMLE and her life in the institute. Her YouTube channel also has shorts of questions and answers (QnAs) on state medical colleges, daily life at AIIMS Rishikesh and more. With inputs from Josh Talks (joshtalks.com)
