Drass is known for two things: bitter cold and the memory of war. It is not a place people associate with IIT. But this year, a 20-year-old girl from Khunda village in Drass sat for JEE Advanced and, in her second attempt, she came out with AIR 723, making her one of the few girls from Ladakh to clear the exam.
In conversation with indianexpress.com, JEE ranker Isma Jabeen shares that she is the first person in her family to have not just appeared for but cleared JEE Advanced. She is aware of what that might mean for those who come after her – siblings, neighbours, younger students in Kargil and Drass who may not have known the exam existed until now.
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“I feel that now everyone has come to know a little more about (JEE) Advanced, and they will go, they will research, and they will definitely join,” she says.
Weighing options
With AIR 723, Isma was initially weighing her options between Civil Engineering and Computer Science. The choice, she explains, was shaped by where she intends to end up.
“I want to live in Ladakh. In Ladakh, there isn’t much scope for Computer Science, and there aren’t any private companies here, so that’s why I am oriented towards civil,” she says. Civil Engineering, in a Union Territory with massive infrastructure needs and ongoing development work, makes practical sense for her and her parents.
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She is open to internships abroad, even to spending time outside Ladakh for studies, but only for a while. “At the end, I want to come back to Ladakh.”
When asked if there is family pressure behind that, she responds, “No, it’s my own decision. I am comfortable here, and I don’t want to leave this place for my whole life. I can’t live outside.”
“Why don’t you join medical?”
Isma claims that she is one of only two girls from Ladakh to have cleared JEE Advanced this year. This holds special significance in Drass, where awareness about the exam is still nascent, where internet connectivity can disappear with a snowfall, and where the advice for a girl who is good at Biology is to become a doctor.
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Isma heard that advice too. More than once. “Some people did tell me that if your Biology is so good, then why don’t you join medical? Go into the medical field; there is a lot of scope there,” she recalls.
“But later on, I didn’t really listen to them,” she says.
For her, it was a small act of defiance, but her family was never the problem. “My family was quite supportive. They didn’t really have any negative reaction.” That support, she says, made all the difference, not just in the JEE Advanced results, but in how she experienced the two attempts leading up to IIT.
Isma first heard about JEE in Class 10, when she knew she wanted to do something in Mathematics. She finished Class 12 from JKBOSE in 2025 and took a drop year, joining RISE coaching.
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Preparing at the edge of the map
Drass is one of the coldest inhabited places in the world. It sits in the Kargil district of Ladakh, far from the infrastructure that most JEE aspirants use in Delhi or Kota. Connectivity is unreliable. There are no big coaching institutes. The peer group chasing IIT seats is small.
For most students, this would read as a list of disadvantages. Isma sees it differently.
“Because in Kota all the kids are competing, so at least, staying in Drass I was on a safer side,” she says when asked how preparing in Drass was an advantage for her than in Kota or Delhi.
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“If maybe I were somewhere else, I would feel stress there, and then I would give up, but since I was here, I was close to my family, so it helped to stay away from the rat race.”
She did not keep a small phone or cut herself off from social media. She did not study 12 or 13 hours a day. Her preparation philosophy was different from other toppers, and that was, “Keep revising in early stages, don’t create any backlog, don’t do too much, but keep reading consistently.”
There were hard moments – stretches where she just wanted it to be over. “In many stages, it feels like, let it just be over now, when will it end!” she says. “Then it just passes like that.”
The drop year
“Everyone was like, ‘Why are you wasting a year? Why are you doing this? Join some college,’,” Isma recalls.
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She had backup plans – she had filled forms for CUET and IISER, and her JEE Main score of 91 percentile would have fetched her a decent NIT. But she held her ground, and her family supported her. “In the end, my family was supportive, so it turned out well,” she says.
Her message to students in Kargil and Ladakh who want to follow a similar path is, “Don’t listen to society too much, do what you want, and just go and do it. That’s it.”