From Best Friends At Coaching To Cracking AIIMS Entrance Exam, Here's The Story Of Five Toppers

Five friends who hung out together, ate together and studied for their medical entrance exam together for two years in Kota, will be together at AIIMS-Delhi for another five years.

facebook/Nishita Purohit

Buddies Nishita Purohit (ranked 1st), Harsh Agarwal (5th), Rishab Raj (6th), Harshit Anand (7th) and Abhishek Dogra (9th) bagged five places in the top 10 of the AIIMS MBBS-2017 exam.

Coming from different states, they met in Kota exactly two years ago. While Nishita is from Gujarat, Harsh and Harshit are from West Bengal, Rishab from Bihar and Abhishek from Maharashtra. They came to Kota with dreams of securing a seat in any top medical institute.

facebook/Harsh Agarwal

The others in the top 10 were Archit Gupta (2nd), Tamoghna Ghosh (3rd), Nipun Chandra (4th), Rinku Sarmah (8th), Abhishek Dogra (9th) and Manish Mulchandani (10th).

Soon after the results were announced early Thursday morning, the five friends thanked each other for the healthy competition among themselves and for keeping each other's spirits high.

Purohit, in all interviews after the results, has pointed out the importance of studying with the best.

"The display of competence by friends or batchmates in every class acted as motivation to perform better than them," Purohit said over the phone from Surat.

Another thrilling coincidence was their ranking sequence - Harsh Agarwal (5th), Rishab Raj (6th) and Harshit Anand (7th). The three scored in a similar manner in most of their tests. The cluster rankings, they said, are almost as though they had contested the exam among themselves.

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Elated, Rishab Raj, from Bihar, said, "Ranks don't matter, what matters is many more fun-filled days with old buddies. Our club was not restricted to seeing who solved a puzzle first but always built our confidence when we had scored beneath our expectations in tests."

Their sense of achievement doubled when they were told by their teachers that never in the history of AIIMS had a group of five friends qualified together.

facebook/harshit anand

The remaining five students of the top 10 to qualify for AIIMS this year are from the same batch of Kota's Allen Career Institute, while 45 of the top 100 to qualify for the Indian Institutes of Technology this year were from various coaching institutes in the same town.

Over the phone from West Bengal, amidst a series of questions from this correspondent, Anand answered how the five friends had benefited from each other.

"We decided to study subjects a day in advance. It kept us in the limelight in the classroom. Similarly, every evening we would discuss among ourselves any problems or confusion that arose." They felt this approach helped save the time they would have spent asking the teacher, said Anand.

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Raj said they were aware that studying in AIIMS means dealing with mountains of expectations not only from family and friends but from the nation. "A medical degree from AIIMS will give us a push but, at the same time, expectations would be very high. We will try to do our best," Raj said.

Topper Nishita Purohit, who wants to become a cardiac surgeon, said, "I am expecting the same results in NEET also."

It's almost after a decade that a girl has topped the AIIMS exam.