Get to know the Class of 2016
Kulpreet Chilana On a 15-hour flight from Seoul, South Korea, to New York this summer — time many teenagers might have used for a long nap or Angry Birds marathon — Kulpreet Chilana made his own inflight entertainment: The 18-year-old from Franklin Lakes, N.J., used the idle time to create an iPad app for a Punjabi keyboard, one of several apps he’s designed in homage to his Indian heritage. “I’m really passionate about bringing my culture into technology, “ says Chilana, who grew up speaking both English and Punjabi. As a high school freshman, he taught himself to read and write in Hindi, India’s official language, and Urdu, the lingua franca of Pakistan. “It was really interesting to see how certain aspects of the Urdu, Hindi and Punjabi cultures were different, but the structure and everything is so similar.” The experience prompted Chilana to create his first app, a Punjabi-English dictionary....