Gaurav Surana is founder-director of the Kolkata-based Tutors Circle Education Pvt. Ltd (TCE, estb.2011), a company providing education consultancy services including test preparation and application assistance to students aspiring to study abroad.

Currently, TCE’s team of five alumni of top-ranked universities (London, IIT-Kharagpur, IIM-Bangalore) provide counseling to students to facilitate their admission into undergrad, postgraduate and MBA programmes of premier institutions abroad.

Newspeg. Tutors Circle is adding two new verticals this year. The first will provide test prep and counseling services to students for undergrad and postgraduate education within India. The other project, ICudB (International Colleges & Universities Data Base), launched in mid-March, is a user-friendly one-stop shop for all information required by Indian students wanting to study abroad. “ICudB will extensively provide college profiles and scholarships information together with applications tracking services,” says Gaurav Surana.

History. A finance postgraduate of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Surana began his professional career with Merrill Lynch (2004-08) in the US, before returning to Kolkata, and started mentoring students for study abroad prior to promoting TCE three years later. Since then, the company has prepared and placed over 2,000 students in premier universities abroad, including Oxford (UK), MIT (USA), Princeton (USA), Warwick, London School of Economics, St. Andrews University (UK), RWTH Aachen (Germany) and ETH, Zurich (Switzerland).

In March 2014, Surana together with Priyamvada Agarwal — an alumna of Calcutta University with postgrad certification in special education and counseling from Cambridge University — promoted BONDs which helps students prepare for GMAT, GRE, SAT, TOEFL, PTE & IELTS. “Our students are put through a series of intensive mock tests to strengthen and sharpen their skills to crack these exams. With class size restricted to six and students coached by highly-qualified mentors, we have a 92 percent success record,” says Agarwal. Prices for services range from Rs.5,000-50,000.

Direct talk. “Our USP is that we are a team of graduates from top universities abroad and in India. We offer globally equivalent services based on our own experiences with education abroad. Two mentors are assigned to each student to prepare them to write exams and choose the appropriate college/university,” says Gaurav Surana.

Future plans. With the explosive growth of e-commerce and internet usage worldwide, Surana has drawn up plans to transform TCE into an online business enterprise helping students from small cities to cross every hurdle as they plan their higher education in India or abroad.

Baishali Mukherjee (Kolkata)