Sunstone Rise to ensure a smooth transition of students from schools to higher education

New Delhi, 14 December: Sunstone, one of India’s leading higher education startups with a presence across 35+ cities in 50+ institutions announced the launch of its ‘Sunstone Rise’ programme, aimed at enabling the students of classes 11th and 12th in making an informed choice about their career and higher education options. The Delhi High Court recently issued a directive stressing on the importance of career guidance to students of classes 11th and 12th and asked the government to ensure that there is an appropriate system of counselling in schools. Challenges faced by the students of these classes are lack of expert guidance, no insight into college life and a dearth of information about the industry demands. With limited information and a penchant for following the herd mentality, students often take up the courses that are considered popular and later regret their choices. Peer and family pressure also results in students opting for courses that are not suited for their skill set.

Successful in over 1,000 schools, the program has benefited 100,000 students till date and the higher education startup aims to expand Sunstone Rise program to 10,000 schools in 40 cities and target 4 Lakh more students.

Divided into four stages, the Sunstone Rise program is aimed at clearing this conundrum and enabling these students to select the best career option for them. The four stages are:

● Career Discovery Test: A personalised test based on Sunstone’s 3-A’s Framework, i.e. Appeal, Aptitude, and Aspiration. Test items are specifically designed to check for students’ skills and aptitude based on various factors across 40 job roles and nine higher education tracks.

● Junior UG Program: A 10-day sneak-peak into the courses like BBA, BCA, BCOM, BPharma, BA LLB, MBBS and B Arch that encompasses live sessions by industry veterans, competitions and quizzes that have participation certificates, career bootcamps and case studies led by senior professionals.

● Board Boosters: A program tailor made for board exam students where they will receive sample papers, masterclasses, doubt clearing sessions and every possible resource for their examination.

● National Scholarship Test: An online exam that tests students’ reasoning and analytical, linguistic, comprehensive and general awareness skills and then offers a scholarship to help aid their higher education. The total scholarship pool is Rs. 1 crore.

Elaborating on the program, Ashish Munjal, Co-Founder and CEO of Sunstone said, “We are thrilled to introduce this program and we hope this helps to solve the problems faced by students. This stage of their lives are extremely crucial and the conventional method of counselling fails to address their core issues. This program is spread across six months and also has the provision of upskilling of teachers. Every student is a unique individual and it is important that his/her career guidance is customised as per needs and skills. This program is integrated to work with their existing schoolwork and just requires a commitment of four hours in one week.” The startup believes in the philosophy of #EducationThatWorks and is focused on bridging the industry-academia gap. The course module of the mini-UG programs are aimed at providing a window into the courses and also give an insight into the average FEE, CTC of the colleges and the job opportunities a student can avail after graduating in a particular discipline.