What Priya Knew at Sixteen

Priya Nayak grew up in Baliguma, a village of approximately 800 people in the Kandhamal district of Odisha. Her father is a daily-wage agricultural labourer. Her mother teaches at the village's primary school on an honorary basis — there is no formal salary. Priya is the eldest of three children and the first in her family to complete Class 12.

When we asked her what career options she knew about at sixteen, she listed: doctor, teacher, nurse, government job.

"That was the entire universe of possibilities I was aware of. Not because I was unintelligent — I was always first in class — but because those were the only careers I had ever seen anyone do. There was no one around me who had a different kind of work life."

She scored 81% in her Class 12 board exams, with Biology as her strongest subject. The natural next step, as her school and community understood it, would be to attempt NEET and aim for a nursing or paramedical program.

Priya had doubts she could not name. She was not drawn to clinical care. What she was drawn to — though she had no professional context for it — was understanding how things worked at the level she could not see: why certain crops were diseased, how her grandmother's diabetes medication functioned, what happened at the biological level when someone healed.

But nobody had ever offered her a framework to connect that curiosity to a career.

The NGO Partnership

In 2021, Dheya formalised a partnership with Pragati Foundation, an NGO operating in four districts of Odisha with a mandate to support first-generation learners in accessing higher education and dignified employment. The partnership connected Pragati's network of school-based field coordinators with Dheya's digital assessment and mentoring platform.

Priya's school coordinator, Sanjay Pradhan, attended a Pragati-Dheya orientation in January 2022 and returned with one clear assignment: identify the five Class 12 students in his cluster who had the most potential and the least access to guidance. Priya was on that list within minutes of the discussion.

She took the RAPD assessment online — on a smartphone shared with her school, with Sanjay sitting beside her to help navigate the interface — in February 2022. Her results showed a strongly Analytical orientation with secondary Practical dimensions: a person driven by understanding how things work and applying that understanding to produce tangible outcomes. The combination, her assigned Dheya mentor explained, is the foundation of research, applied science, and technical roles across the life sciences.

Her mentor was Dr. Meghna Pillai, a biologist with twelve years of industry experience in pharmaceutical research before joining Dheya's mentor network. Dr. Pillai had never met a student quite like Priya — not in terms of ability, but in terms of starting circumstances.

"The first thing I had to do was expand Priya's map. She didn't know biotechnology existed as a career. She didn't know industrial microbiology existed. She had never heard of a research associate or a QC analyst. My first job wasn't to assess her fit — it was to describe the territory."

Building the Map: Session by Session

The early sessions between Priya and Dr. Pillai were unlike standard mentoring engagements. Rather than beginning with goal-setting, they began with orientation: what does a biotechnology company actually do? What does a person who works in a pharmaceutical QC laboratory do on a Tuesday morning? What is the difference between a B.Sc. and a B.Tech in biotechnology, and which makes more sense given Priya's financial constraints?

The financial constraints were real and specific. Priya's family had no capacity to support a four-year private college education in a major city. Any path forward had to be fundable through scholarship, government programs, or low-cost institution fees.

Dr. Pillai researched and presented three viable options:

  1. Central University of Odisha, Koraput — B.Sc. Biotechnology, minimal fees (₹8,000–12,000 per year), scholarship-accessible, direct bus service from Phulbani district.

  2. Odisha University of Agriculture and Technology (OUAT), Bhubaneswar — B.Sc. Agriculture with Biotechnology electives, government institution, National Scholarship Portal-eligible.

  3. Sambalpur University — B.Sc. Biotechnology, affordable, hostel facilities with women's scholarship coverage.

Priya's parents had never heard of any of these institutions. They had assumed higher education meant going to Bhubaneswar and spending money they did not have.

"Dr. Pillai sent me the full list of scholarship programs I was eligible for. I didn't know any of them existed. Central Sector Scholarship, Oasis Scholarship for SC students — I qualified for both. My actual out-of-pocket cost for the three-year B.Sc. ended up being under ₹25,000 total. My parents had thought it would cost lakhs."

Three Years of College With Ongoing Mentoring

Priya enrolled at the Central University of Odisha in August 2022. Dr. Pillai continued working with her through the degree — not every week, but at structured intervals: orientation in month one, mid-year check-ins, and intensive sessions at the end of each academic year to map the next steps.

The mentoring was not academic tutoring. Dr. Pillai helped Priya navigate the metacognitive challenges of being a first-generation learner in an institutional environment: how to talk to professors, how to ask for recommendation letters, how to think about an internship as a career-building instrument rather than just a college requirement.

In her second year, Priya secured a summer internship at a small biotech startup in Bhubaneswar — arranged partly through Dr. Pillai's professional network. It was the first time she had been in a real laboratory performing real work rather than a teaching lab. The experience confirmed what the RAPD assessment had suggested: she was deeply engaged by analytical, hands-on scientific work. She returned for her third year with a level of confidence that her professors noted explicitly.

"Before the internship, Priya was quiet and kept to herself — not unusual for a student from her background in a new environment. After, she was asking questions in seminars, leading her lab group. Something had clicked."

The Outcome

In June 2025, Priya completed her B.Sc. Biotechnology with a CGPA of 8.4 out of 10. She applied for eight entry-level positions using a CV and cover letter that Dr. Pillai had helped her build over their final three mentoring sessions.

She received interview calls from five organisations and offers from three.

She accepted a Research Associate position at a Hyderabad-based biotech firm specialising in diagnostics. Starting CTC: ₹4.8 LPA — a number that means very little in Hyderabad's cost structure but represents approximately four times what her father earns in an entire year of agricultural labour.

She has since enrolled in a part-time M.Sc. programme and is on a research pathway that Dr. Pillai describes as "pointing toward a PhD, if she wants it."

Priya was asked what she would say to students in similar circumstances — first-generation, rural, uncertain.

"I would tell them that the map matters more than anything. I was capable before I met Dr. Pillai. But I was capable in the dark. She turned on a light. Once I could see what was possible, I knew what to do."

The Systemic Gap This Case Exposes

Priya's story is not remarkable because of exceptional talent, though she has it. It is remarkable because of how close she came to never knowing her options existed.

The career guidance gap in rural India is not primarily a funding gap or a talent gap. It is an information and access gap. Students in Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities grow up surrounded by people who have navigated the education-to-career pipeline. Their families, neighbours, and teachers provide informal exposure to possibilities. Students in rural areas lack this ambient information — and the formal guidance system in most government schools is either absent or limited to the same narrow prescription of doctor-teacher-nurse-government that Priya described.

Structured mentoring, delivered through NGO and institutional partnerships, addresses this gap at scale. One mentor, working with ten to fifteen students per year from under-resourced backgrounds, can generate outcomes that persist for generations — through the demonstration effect alone.

Bringing Career Guidance to Every Student

Dheya works with NGOs, government programs, and educational institutions to bring structured career guidance to students who lack access to traditional career services. The model is scalable, cost-effective, and, as Priya's story demonstrates, capable of producing outcomes that compound across generations.

If you represent an organisation working with under-resourced student populations, or if you are an individual who believes every student deserves structured career guidance regardless of geography or family background:

Explore Dheya's institutional partnership programs →

The first step is always the same: turning on the light.