{"id":778,"date":"2026-09-15T04:51:50","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T04:51:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stories.nptel.ac.in\/?p=778"},"modified":"2026-09-15T05:58:03","modified_gmt":"2026-09-15T05:58:03","slug":"reading-on-the-metro-how-afra-sabreen-turned-three-failed-courses-into-seven-nptel-stars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stories.nptel.ac.in\/index.php\/2026\/09\/15\/reading-on-the-metro-how-afra-sabreen-turned-three-failed-courses-into-seven-nptel-stars\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading on the Metro: How Afra Sabreen Turned Three Failed Courses Into Seven NPTEL Stars"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0Afra Sabreen<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Afra doesn’t remember choosing a study schedule for NPTEL. She remembers the metro. Forty minutes each way between home and college, notes open on her lap, assignments finished somewhere between one station and the next. It is, still, mostly how she studies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It started with her brother, Rizwan Ahamed N, a pre-doctoral fellow at IIT Kharagpur and an NPTEL star in his own right, who told her about the platform’s benefits when she was in the first year of her B.Com degree. Afra didn’t know much going in; she had been searching for certification courses online without any real direction, so she signed up for three courses on his word and failed all three.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I thought of leaving it,” she says. Her brother wouldn’t let her. He pushed her to try again, and she decided to treat the next attempt as a challenge rather than a formality. The following term she registered for six courses instead of three, and cleared every one, some with Elite grades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since then, she has completed nineteen NPTEL courses, across Finance, Economics, Marketing, HR, and Management, and earned seven stars, a number she is still adding to on that same commute. When asked which course left the deepest impression, she instantly names Fundamentals of Cost Accounting by Prof. Arindam Banerjee at ICMAI. Because it mirrored her university curriculum, the course perfectly complemented her degree and sharpened the concepts her own professors had taught.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The failure taught her something the later success didn’t. In that first year, she skipped her assignments outright, gambling that she could clear the exam on its own. She couldn’t. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

“I knew I would fail,” she says of walking into that exam, and she did, undone not by the paper itself but by the internal marks she had never earned. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

She tells the story without much drama now, the way people describe a mistake they have already made peace with. It\u2019s why, the second time, she didn\u2019t skip a single assignment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her college noticed the turnaround before she had fully registered it herself. She became the first NPTEL Star from Anna Adarsh College for Women; her achievements were featured in the college newsletter, and her principal called her in to acknowledge it, a small, formal moment that Afra still brings up unprompted. Two internships followed through the platform: a six-week virtual research internship at IIT Patna under Prof. Nalin Bharati, and an eight-week in-person internship at IIT Madras under Prof. Vaibhav Chawla that she still calls one of the best experiences of her life. She was also selected for a pre-doctoral project at IIT Roorkee, though circumstances kept her from taking it up. Another came without a title or a stipend: speaking at the NPTEL Star Meet at IIT Madras, a stage she hadn\u2019t stood on before.

None of it converts into academic credit, her college doesn’t offer credit transfer for management students, so every course she has taken exists for her own sake. When placement interviews came, the questions kept circling back to concepts she\u2019d first met in an NPTEL course. That, more than the stars or the certificates, is what she keeps returning to when asked what the courses actually mean to her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Afra is now her department’s NPTEL coordinator, running awareness sessions for juniors standing where she once stood. Her journey traces back, in a straight line, to her brother, still the person she names first when asked who shaped her path. She is pursuing CA Intermediate, working at an auditor\u2019s office, and doing an MBA by correspondence through the University of Madras.

Asked what she would tell someone still deciding whether to start, she doesn’t philosophize. “Start earlier,” she says. “As soon as possible.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

It’s the same advice, in fewer words, that carried her from three failures to seven stars.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

~written by Elsa Prasad<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0Afra Sabreen Afra doesn’t remember choosing a study schedule for NPTEL. She remembers the metro. Forty minutes each way between home and college, notes open on her lap, assignments finished somewhere between one station and the next. It is, still, mostly how she studies. It started with her brother, Rizwan Ahamed N, a pre-doctoral fellow … <\/p>\n

Read more “Reading on the Metro: How Afra Sabreen Turned Three Failed Courses Into Seven NPTEL Stars”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":782,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nptel-star"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stories.nptel.ac.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stories.nptel.ac.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stories.nptel.ac.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stories.nptel.ac.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stories.nptel.ac.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=778"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stories.nptel.ac.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":781,"href":"https:\/\/stories.nptel.ac.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778\/revisions\/781"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stories.nptel.ac.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/782"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stories.nptel.ac.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stories.nptel.ac.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stories.nptel.ac.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}