24NorthStar

24NorthStar helps kids in Class 9-12 find career clarity and get admission into TOP colleges worldwide (including Ivy Leagues, OxBridge)

Contact via www.24northstar.com if you need our help for your kids.

Co-Founder | Career Strategy for high school kids

Scholar Strategy

Scholar Strategy is an award-winning STUDY ABROAD ADMISSIONS and CAREER STRATEGY CONSULTANT for MS/MBA/MIS/Ph.D./MFE applicants! 

My mission is to help Indian & Asian kids craft their career pathways not out of societal pressure but a deeper reflection of their personalities and values!

We do this by:

1. Study and Work Abroad Consulting 
- 650+ candidates (including a handful in their 30s) made it to Top 100 universities in the US, Canada etc
- Clients got into MIT, Harvard, Stanford, UIUC, Georgia Tech, CMU, Columbia, UT Austin, Berkeley, UCLA etc
- Clients are interning/working at Meta, Tesla, google, amazon, apple, intel, and many enviable startups

"I had admits from 9 out of 10 schools I applied to, including MIT and UC, Berkeley and scholarships from other three. I could not have asked for more! I eventually chose MIT. Had it not been for Nistha, I would have never even been able to make it to this embarking journey"

2. Career Coaching
- Coached 3 teenagers to help select courses in Class XI & undergrad
- Coached 10 professionals feeling unfulfilled in their current jobs (incl a guy from Microsoft)
- Helped 4 candidates in 30+ age group revamp their career when they were feeling stuck professionally

3. Products, Courses & Workshops
- MS Book: Smart Engineer’s Complete Guide to MS in USA, is a reference book for Engineers and why they should study abroad. It is filled with my own experiences, lessons and the interviews of successful professionals.

"...this book helped me a lot on various stages of my application process right from University selection to preparing the perfect version of my SOP to Managing the finances and preparing for the Visa, all in one place. I strongly recommend this book to anyone who wants to pursue their Masters"

4. Community
- We are now 70K+ on LinkedIn, 75K+ on Instagram and 50K+ on Quora. 10K+ people read our newsletters. 
- Our meetups and workshops have regularly helped aspirants bond with eachother online & offline.

Founder | Study Abroad & Career Strategy for college students & young professionals

Unstartup, No Shortcuts, Futurepreneurs

Unstartup traces the gravity-defying ascent of Unacademy. Drawing on numerous conversations with people in and around Unacademy including its founders, board members, advisors, current and ex-employees, Nistha takes the reader through a page-turning rhapsody of startup strategies and lessons. 

No Shortcuts was recognized as a bestseller and 3rd BEST BUSINESS BOOK of 2018 by BANGALORE BUSINESS LITFEST

Futurepreneurs was one of the first books to cover the Deeptech and AI startups in India.

Nistha pursued those who rose from humble beginnings yet making a dent in the Indian startup universe. Her books are a product of in-depth research and love for startups - www.startupbookindia.com 

In her incisive one-on-one interviews with 30+ ambitious founders of India including Girish Mathrubootham, Nithin Kamath, Gaurav Munjal, Tarun Mehta, Awais Ahmed and others, Nistha uncovers the decisions and insights that led these startup founders to find their unique roadmap to success.

Bestselling Author

Yipit

Content and Affiliate Manager

InSITE

Guided startups in Manhattan on their pitch decks, ran the content and social media efforts. Was featured on Fred Wilson's AVC blog.

Fellow

Fundspire

Preparing for fundraising, helping develop sales and marketing strategies

Summer MBA Intern

Veronis Ventures

Due diligence, sourcing deals, deal analysis and technology help

Intern

Citi

Derivatives Execution Services

1.   [C++] Manage releases of DES pricing engine and provide enhancements for faster and reliable flow of market data.
2.   [J2EE and C++] Collaborated with Citi Derivatives Market Inc (Option Market Makers) to successfully implement strategies for internalizing options order flow. The design facilitated easy monitoring and logging for subsequent data analysis.
2.   [Servlets/JSP] Successfully rolled out a ‘post-trade changes’ system to allow Billing and Operation users to edit and audit information on executed trades through user-interface for quicker and convenient book-keeping.
3.   Created various UI enhancements to provide faster and more efficient management by Desk Users.

Assistant Vice President

Independent

Clients:
My Tennis Fashion: Freelanced articles and provided online media consultation (June - Dec 2009)
Sports Doing Good: Developing online business development strategy (Mar 2010 - now)

Internet Media Consultant

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

[Linux kernel programming and device driver modification]

Designed a Rate Control Framework for multi-channel wireless networks to facilitate application-level rate control. This architecture was later implemented and tested on a 20 nodes testbed, and demoed at MobiCom 2007.

Graduate Research Assistant

Helped 700+ study abroad in TOP univ (MIT Harvard etc) & get MAANG jobs via ScholarStrategy | 95K+ | Bestselling Author | LI Top Voices

Computer Scientist from UIUC and MBA dropout from NYU, Nistha founded India's leading study abroad and career coaching company - Scholar Strategy & 24NorthStar. It has helped 750+ applicants get into top MS and MBA programs in USA including MIT, Harvard, Stanford, CMU, Berkeley and so on. With her internship and jobhunt guidance, many of her clients have landed positions with FAANG, Tesla, Microsoft, Intel, Salesforce etc. 

Previously, Nistha worked on Wall Street and with fast growing startups in Manhattan. In fact, she had two fulltime job offers right after her 1st year at NYU Stern. This made her drop out of MBA and join Yipit, data based startup founded by Harvard grads. At Stern, she had the privilege of running its first Entrepreneurship Summit that featured the likes of Seth Godin and Chris Dixon. One thing she finds incredible about her NYU journey is getting featured on Fred Wilson's popular AVC blog. 

After returning to India, Nistha started mentoring engineers and writing books. As of today, she is a recognized career coach, author and renowned career and startup speaker. She has given talks at multiple startup events and college startup fests including IIT Mumbai, IIT Madras, NITs, SIIB, IMT Ghaziabad, MDI Gurgaon and so on. 

Nistha has authored multiple bestselling books on Indian startups - 

1. NO SHORTCUTS that features 15 interviews with Girish Mathrubootham (Freshworks), Nithin Kamath (Zerodha), Jaydeep Barman (Faasos), Tarun Mehta (Ather Energy) and others. The book won the 3rd best business book of the year award in 2019 and continues to be a bestseller for aspiring Indian entrepreneurs.
2. UNSTARTUP that chronicles the journey of Unacademy from a YouTube channel to a $3.5B startup.
3. Futurepreneurs, coauthored with MIT alum Varun Aggarwal, features the business and technical details of 10 Deeptech & AI startups in India. 

An avid writer, her content has clocked 25M+ views and 1.5 lac+ followers across multiple social media platforms. 

For your own career queries, you can contact her on https://scholarstrategy.com/contact
For your kid's career guidance, contact on https://24northstar.com

Specialties: career coaching, study abroad guidance, storytelling, business writing, content creation

I remember crying in my second semester at UIUC because it snowed so long and so bad and I was just tired of the 4pm sunsets.

In fact, I had spent one night in my lab at EE dept where I was RA’ing and when I was walking out early morning, I could see squirrels and hares lying frozen in the lawn outside. It got really depressing. 

The thing is - I had no clue about the weather I was stepping into when I joined UIUC.

And even till this day, I see Indians not realizing how brutally cold some of US universities can be and especially if you are coming from South India, you are going to get the shock of your life.

So yes, while US is no Canada (I don’t know how people survive there tbh), here are some deceptively cold universities that will freeze your soul for 6 months straight. 

1️⃣ University of Wisconsin-Madison
❄️ Negative temps for weeks. Your sambar will turn to ice before you pour it.

2️⃣ University of Minnesota – Twin Cities
🌬️ Wind chill here isn’t a joke. It’s a life-threatening personality trait.

3️⃣ University of Michigan – Ann Arbor
🌫️ Cold + grey skies + constant drizzle. The existential dread is built into the campus vibe.

4️⃣ UIUC (Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
🌪️ Flatlands + snowstorms = a frozen, empty cornfield with Wi-Fi.

5️⃣ SUNY Buffalo
❄️ Snow so deep, your OPT paperwork might not survive the walk to FedEx. You are pretty much in Canada. 

6️⃣ University of Chicago
💨 Ice + wind + gray skies = seasonal depression bundled into tuition.

7️⃣ Iowa State University
🌫️ Fog, frostbite, and feelings you never asked for.

8️⃣ Michigan Technological University
❄️ This is basically Canada with student loans. Beautiful, brutal, isolating.

9️⃣ North Dakota State University
🌬️ You will walk through blizzards to reach Walmart. That is your cardio.

🔟 University of Rochester
🌧️ Cold + overcast + 200+ cloudy days a year. Bring vitamin D tablets with your I-20.

1️⃣1️⃣ Syracuse University
🌨️ Snow capital of the Northeast.

Extreme weather is part of the US experience - whether it’s your car dashboard melting in Texas heat or the mind-numbing Lake Michigan wind in Chicago. 

Just go mentally prepared. The academics are hard, but the climate sometimes hits harder.

Nistha Tripathi

Yes, Brain Rot is real and social media is making us dumber but don’t be harsh on yourself.
Turns out: even ChatGPT can get brain rot.

A new research paper, “LLMs Can Get ‘Brain Rot’!”, ran a simple but brutal experiment:
→ What happens when you continually train large language models on the kind of viral, low-signal content that dominates today’s social media?

The researchers took 2 AI models and trained one on viral tweets and short videos. 

The Q was: Does low-quality input alone cause cognitive decline in AI?
Short answer: YES.

Here’s what happened to models fed on the junk content:

- Became worse at reasoning tasks
- Lost track of long-context inputs
- Showed more “dark traits” in personality benchmarks
- And most importantly, fell into a failure mode the authors call thought-skipping (jumping to shallow answers instead of reasoning step by step)

Even when the researchers later gave the models high-quality data to “heal” them, the models didn’t fully recover.

As Wired put it, the models started acting a bit like humans who spend too much time scrolling reaction-driven feeds: shorter attention, lazier logic, weaker depth.

We all consume a diet of quick reels, low-effort opinions, and fast dopamine takes.

If a powerful model loses depth when trained on junk…
what do you think happens to our own thinking?

The insight is simple:

Your brain is the most powerful model you’ll ever use.
Your environment is your training data.
And your daily inputs shape your long-term clarity.

Better books.
Better conversations.
Better mentors.
Better information hygiene.

Curate your feed like your future depends on it,
because it does.

PS. And you know what’s scary? AI is anyway getting trained on the Internet data which is becoming increasingly more junk. Its reasoning is going to deteriorate and what will that mean for billions of people using it to make their life decisions?

#behuman

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When my books were releasing, I used to cold email journalists and media houses.
Ninety-five percent of the time, the answer was the same: "We don’t do unpaid promotion."

So I stopped chasing PR and focused on what I knew best: writing.

I had been blogging since 2005 anyway.

First on Quora: 53K followers and 11M reads.
Then LinkedIn: 139K followers.
Instagram: 202K across accounts.
YouTube: 75K and 12.7M views.

I wrote about careers, study abroad, and Indian startups based on real experience and years of interviewing founders.

Gradually, something changed.
PR began coming to me.

It started with smaller portals.
Then came mentions in Times, Mint, Business Insider and Indian Express.

Earlier this year, Scholar Strategy received a full feature in Bloomberg Markets.
A BBC video interview was scheduled but cancelled last minute.

And this week, 24NorthStar was quoted in The Straits Times (Singapore) on global universities opening campuses in India.

The best part is something completely unexpected. Many of these turned into genuine conversations. When a journalist ended a call with "Can I reach out to you for advice for my daughter?" it made me far happier than any published quote.

→ Here is what this entire journey taught me:
Every game has its rules. In PR, the rule is simple: be sought, not seek.

Social media has made that easier. If your voice is honest, consistent and useful, people will find you.
If it is not, no amount of outreach will make them look twice.

Build the platform.
The press follows.

There are good journalists out there who care for true opinions. Let them find you.
✌️

When I told this parent that their child needs to STOP doing anymore MUNs, they were first offended.

Their child was in 10th grade and had already done 10 MUNs. 

-

For the uninitiated, MUNs means Model United Nations. Basically, teenagers pretending to solve world crises in school auditoriums. 

Its good for learning public speaking and geo politics but if one is doing 5-10 MUNs, 
that’s a problem. 

-

The child was spending so much time doing MUNs that she had no time to discover herself.

No research.
No projects.
No exploration of STEM, design, business.
Just committee after committee.

→ For STEM kids especially, those hours are better spent on hackathons, research, STEM competitions or Data/AI/Domain specific projects.

- 

Then, there is the instant gratification trap.

Every child wins something at an MUN.
That dopamine hit becomes addictive. You keep participating again and again to win something even though that award is barely recognized or means anything later on. 

→ Instead, focus on evidence-based writing, coding/modeling, statistics, finance, design, product execution etc.

-

Plus, it skews career choices. 
After too many MUNs, every teenager suddenly wants to build a career in “public policy”.

Let’s be honest most MUNs are a money-making machine. 

If you want to do MUNs, do 1-3 only. And do the legit ones like Harvard MUN or Singapore MUNs which are very competitive and actually mean something. 

A lot of other circuits are just pay-to-play with recycled agendas.

-

Remember: Admissions officers and recruiters can see right through a CV stuffed with 8 identical-looking MUN certificates.

Learn what you need from 1-2 MUNs and then move on. There are much better things to focus on. 

Impact > Certificates. Always.

#careerdiscovery #24nothstar

To everybody who wrote the CAT this Sunday:

Here’s a famous study on Olympic athletes-

🥇Gold medalists are euphoric.
🥉Bronze medalists are surprisingly happy.
But silver medalists?
🥈They’re often the most miserable.

Because silver makes you obsess over how close you were to gold.
Bronze makes you grateful you made the podium at all.

CAT results follow the same psychology.

99.7 percentile? Pure joy.
You know you’re in the running for the top IIMs.

80 percentile? Acceptance.
You move on, rethink, explore other paths.

But the 93–96 percentile group?
That’s the silver medal zone.

Close enough to hope.

Not close enough to land where you truly want.

And that’s where costly mistakes start. That’s where you pay a small fortune for an "MBA experience" at a shitty college that gives you NOTHING. No ROI, no network, no life lessons. Only a MBA degree that no one cares about these days to be honest.

If you’re in that zone, pause.

You didn’t lose.
You’re just comparing in the wrong direction.

Stop looking at who scored above you.
Look at the life you actually want.
Then choose your next step.

So here’s my unsolicited advice:

- If you're aiming for an MBA, aim high. Very high.
- If you don't make it, don't spend ₹20 lakhs on a Tier 3 college just because "MBA karna hai."

Some of the best moves come from stepping off the podium altogether and switching arenas.

CAT gives you a percentile.
You decide what it becomes.

Remember: you don’t have to bell the cat.

He canceled visas because a student failed to update her address.
He deported a student because of a speeding ticket. 
He harassed professionals who were tragically laid off to leave the country even before 60 days grace period was over.

The same guy and his team are now saying, “US needs immigrants” and “US needs international students”. 

Interesting story behind it:

US Immigration Unit raided a Hyundai manufacturing facility in Georgia few weeks ago.
They found 400-500 people without legal visas and they were immediately deported. 
US later realized that these people knew the key skill of making the batteries. 
It also realized that Americans don’t know how to do this. 
With them gone, Hyundai had to delay the whole production plan.

Point being immigrants are not in US just to mooch off, many of them supply critical skills. Something that Americans either can't or don’t want to do.

I mean I have heard engineers say that an American worker will not work the long working hours that are put in by Indians and other immigrants.

No one is trying to glamorize the extra work, but the fact remains that US became US not by following 8 hour work day culture (Hello Europe), it got there through hard-work ethic and limitless ambition. 

It got there on the shoulders of immigrants who were ready to make something big because they were desperate to survive and hungry enough to thrive. 

→ To cut off immigrants from the economy is nothing short of कुल्हाड़ी पे पैर मारना|

Is that what Trump is finally realizing?

This is what I cover in today's video and what it means for Indians. 

(YouTube link for full video mentioned in the first comment)

Watch it to make well-informed decisions about your career and life. 

PS. Join 75,000 people who watch our weekly long analysis and tips on the YT channel (Scholar Strategy TV) if you haven't 🙏

#scholarstrategy #24northstar

Two super talented applicants with solid industry experience and admits to credible Top 50 universities in USA were refused US student visa for Fall 2025.

Honestly, for no particular reason. One can only surmise - may be they were nervous, may be they spoke a bit too fast…

Those students are still trying to see if they can join in Spring 2026 because they have already put a lot of effort into the process.

BUT who knows what will happen this time.

Still you have to be prepared especially because Spring interviews are trickier than Fall ones. 

This is what I cover in today's video and how not to get rejected. 

(YouTube link for full video mentioned in the first comment)

Watch it to make well-informed decisions about your career and life. 

PS. Join 75,000 people who watch our weekly long analysis and tips on the YT channel (Scholar Strategy TV) if you haven't 🙏

#scholarstrategy #24northstar

My favorite Master’s scholarship is closing in a week 👇

→ It pays YOU ₹40-45 lakh to study.

Fact is that job markets are bad everywhere. 
Thanks to Trump, ROI on US education is decreasing.

So, if you have to hustle for a job anywhere, why not try to lower your tuition fee in the first place?

Better yet: get a degree for FREE.

This is why you need to apply to this probably-the-most generous MS scholarship and that too in a country many people would kill to study in.

Yes it’s super competitive because it’s so worth it.

What is it? 
I’m talking about the Excellence Scholarship & Opportunity Programme (ESOP) in Switzerland!🇨🇭

If you can get this, you can study at ETH Zurich for free (full tuition waived) and get monthly stipend of ₹13 lakh/sem!)

It opens many doors in both academia and the industry. Great for research as well as industry collabs in Europe.

Multinational corporations such as Credit Suisse, Rolex, Siemens, and Pharma giant Novartis are listed among the university’s partner companies for career placements.

Deadline: 30 Nov 2025

🔗 Official Link (Apply here): https://lnkd.in/dwi8VpJE

PS. Mode of teaching is English only

PPS. There is a downside of studying in Switzerland - do you know what?

#scholarships

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