Created: January 19, 2026

Hi, I’m Sarva Jayaraman, a high school freshman at West Windsor Plainsboro High School South. This site is my thinking log, where I publicly share an independent research project called Nayavia.

The project began with a question that stayed with me longer than I expected.

Over the past couple of months, I kept noticing how differently students described their college experiences, even when they attended the same school and arrived with similar preparation. Some felt energized and supported by the environment. Others felt stressed, behind, or out of place, even though nothing about their preparation had changed. What stood out was that these differences were not always explained by effort, motivation, or ability.

Around the same time, my family watched the movie Trading Places. The movie plays with a simple idea: if you change someone’s environment, the person changes. That idea is exaggerated for comedy, but it made me notice something related and more subtle. In college, the environment usually stays the same. Students are selected to be capable, and on paper, the match should work. Yet people experience the same system in very different ways.

That observation became the core question behind Nayavia:

When the environment stays the same, why does it affect people differently?

Most college conversations focus on outcomes. Rankings, selectivity, admissions chances, and prestige tend to dominate. These perspectives are not useless, but they leave out something important. They do not explain what it actually feels like to learn inside a college day to day, or why the same structure can quietly help some students thrive while placing strain on others.

Nayavia exists to explore that gap.

The approach is intentionally simple. I talk to college students and ask the same set of questions each time. After each conversation, I write down what parts of the school made things easier or harder for them. When I speak with multiple students from the same college, I compare their experiences to understand patterns. The goal is not to judge schools or recommend where someone should go, but to describe how different learning environments operate and when they seem to work differently for different people.

At this stage, Nayavia is only a research notebook. No formal data collection has begun, and no conclusions have been reached. What you will find here are questions in progress, early observations, and careful attempts to describe systems without rushing to explain them away.

I am making this work public not because I have answers, but because the process of thinking benefits from clarity and accountability. Writing forces precision, and sharing invites scrutiny. Both are necessary if this project is going to remain honest over time.

Nayavia will evolve slowly. As more conversations take place, some ideas will hold up and others will need to be revised or discarded. The aim is not certainty, but understanding.

If you are here to read the ongoing work, you can explore the research notes directly. If you are here out of curiosity, this page explains where the project comes from and what it is carefully trying to understand.