Come March and the alarm clocks buzz in a frenzy with sleepy kids and their hawk-eyed parents sweating and stressing in the exam fever. Social media is abuzz with campaigns and content about giving the kids much-needed comfort, space and the guidance to make the right stream and career choices. Or even allowing the kids to make their own choices, albeit with the right guidance. The black t-shirt campaign by a popular health drink brand is doing the rounds these days with a core message of allowing the kids to make their own choices based on their aptitude and skills rather than just pushing them to be a part of the rat race. Aside from this, stress and anxiety before exams makes the counseling helplines buzz endlessly.

Exam stress and anxiety has become a norm and has almost acquired a permanent space in the lives of students these days. Recent statistics from WHO indicate how stress is playing havoc with our lives as more and more people are being diagnosed with stress-related disorders with the numbers going as high as one in every 10. And it all begins with the students sitting for the ever-crucial examinations of class X and class XII where expectations are sky high but guidance to make the right choice based on their skills is restricted.

Students in the country, pressurised by the syllabus and the fear of failure, often end up taking extreme measures. And even if exam stress is handled somehow, it is the stress of finding the right course and college that becomes the next big headache haunting both the students and their parents. Students often end up depending upon their parents and teachers for career guidance based on their experience and the limited trends they have seen over their life span. It is in times like these that professional guidance and career counseling is needed and could prove to be the game changer for a student who’s standing at the most important crossroads of his/her life.

It is here that Brainwonders comes into the picture. This Mumbai based career counseling startup uses Taiwan’s DMIT (Dermatoglyphics Multiple Intelligence Test) software to help a candidate understand and figure out what’s best for them and also helps to combat exam stress by focusing on learning style. The software uses fingerprints to generate a report that helps candidates understand their abilities and suggests a career path best suited to their abilities. These biometric scans assists student to identify their native strengths, weakness, characteristics, left and right-brain dominance, which ultimately leads to the question of what is their career choice? The highly researched science behind analysing fingerprint patterns to do brain mapping has helped people of all age groups across various fields.

Students often end up picking careers based on parental or peer pressure, and at times both. Balancing expectations of family while selecting a course as well as their career and avoiding peer pressure while focusing on their potential should be the norm. One should opt for a course and subsequently a career where both interest and aptitude match up. And DMIT helps a student to make the perfect choice.

DMIT helps students strike a balance between their abilities and passion and suggest what’s a good career option for them. The final choice rests on the candidates themselves. Once the fingerprint scans have been received, they are sent to the lab in Malaysia for a detailed analysis, with the report, spread across 24 pages, being generated in three days. Once the report is received, a team of 183 clinical and career psychologists analyse and interpret the report for the students with their guidance and recommendations for the students to make the final judgment. With 230 schools working with this technology, students can hope to benefit and experience learning in a less stressful and a better-informed environment and select the right course for their future based on their core strengths.

The author is Manish Naidu, founder of Brainwonders.