Aashna Nasta's Graduation Ceremony at Dhirubhai Ambani International School

In our series of young Bhagnari achievers we bring to you the proud moments of Aashna Nasta, who has narrated them in her own words.

20 months of projects, essays, presentations, portfolios, reports and exams ended at one glorious occasion – The Graduation Ceremony of the students of the batch of 2009 at Dhirubhai Ambani International School. It was a day marked to end each of our school lives, a day when our parents and grandparents could look upon us with proud smiles and overjoyed expressions, moreover, for us it was the day we graduated with our IB Diplomas.

The IB i.e. the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme is a 2 year programme where we learn to think beyond our text books. We question the existence of everything – right from Does God really exist? To How was the world formed? What is knowledge? Etc. Most of these questions don’t have hard core answers, which makes the discussion more exciting. The best part about the IB is that we don’t choose a specific stream of science, commerce or arts but choose a group of subjects from various field – 1)Language 1; 2) Language 2; 3)Social Studies; 4)Sciences; 5)Math; and 6)Visual Arts. Each of these subjects have 2 levels – higher and standard. We choose 3 higher level subjects and 3 standard level ones. Each subject has 7 points, thus, 42 is the maximum number of points we attain.

The IB Graduation Day on 29^th May 2009 was a power packed occasion with our chairperson Mrs. Nita Ambani and our chief guest Dr. Shashi Tharoor (ex under secretary general of the UN and current external affairs minister of India). His speech was ecstatic; never in my entire school life did I hear a speech where the entire audience was focused at the speaker. Supporting every claim of his with a short story, Dr. Tharoor made sure that we could relate to each phrase of his speech.

Receiving my diploma from Mrs.Ambani and Dr. Tharoor

As we threw our graduation hats in the air that day, we realised what we had accomplished – we had completed school and transformed into adults, ready to face the world, ready to take up every challenge, moreover we had our school motto imbibed within us – DARE TO DREAM; LEARN TO EXCEL!

With my mother and Mr and Mrs. Ambani

With my overjoyed grandmother, Mrs. Dhuru Nasta