Bihar farmer's son enrolls into IIT at 13, picked by Apple at 24

In 2013, Satyam Kumar broke the record for the youngest Indian to secure a IIT seat by clearing his exam and getting a seat at the prestigious institute in Kanpur. (Image credit: LinkedIn/Satyamkumar).

India is full of inspiring stories, particularly of those who emerge from the rural parts of the country where youngsters work their way up the ladder despite coming from poor backgrounds.

One such as story is that of Satyam Kumar, the son of a farmer in Bihar's Bhojpur district, who secured a seat in the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Kanpur at the age of 13 in 2013, after securing a rank of 679 thereby becoming the youngest to achieve the feat.

This was Kumar's second attempt at cracking the IIT exam. In 2012, he cleared the exam after attaining an all-India rank of 8,137 but decided to take the exam again, 12 months later, to get a higher rank in the exam.

The following year, he secured 679th rank in the exam and broke the record for the youngest Indian to crack the IIT exam that was held by Delhi's Sahal Kaushik who secured an IIT seat in 2010, when he was 14 years old.

Kumar enrolled for a combined BTech-MTech course in electrical engineering field at the institute and graduated in 2018 before moving to the United States to pursue his PhD from the University of Texas in Austin.

After finishing his education, Kumar was employed at Apple, at the age of 24, where he worked as a machine learning intern until August 2023.

Despite having high goals and ambition in life, Kumar had told India Today in 2013 that he harboured hopes of returning to his native district to teach children and play a role in improving their lives.