I’ll never forget the educator who gave me the world.

I found Indian Cinemas with a hasty need for another course after a scheduling conflict, and serendipitously fell in love with the subject matter and professor, Priyadarshini Shanker, after only a five minute telephone conversation. Priya navigated me through a reality I’d never before known — she introduced me to the spice and honey of an A.R. Rahman score, the national hunger in a Ritwik Ghatak film, and the luster and poetry in the eyes of Guru Dutt.

With nostalgia and romance, Priya illuminated the life-affirming cinematic canon of her youth, where institutional suppression of identity was confronted by the catharsis of theatrical self-creation. She and I spoke abstractly about theater and it’s social notion for segments of time far beyond our scheduled meetings. Through her assigned films and the conversations we had about world cinema in general, she encouraged me to examine more universal casualties of state and self.

By the next semester, I took on a second academic focus in addition to filmmaking: Ethnic and Diaspora studies. My new courses in the Political Ecology of Development and Lexicon of Migration (in tandem with filmmaking courses) constantly remind me of the prompts Priya ignited in me. In deconstructing my own perplexing global footprint and studying the brutal dilemmas of international persecution, I’ve become increasingly motivated to understand the urgency and significance of self-determination within marginal groups.

Every day I am grateful for what she saw in me and what she gave to me.

Most of my energy lately has been dedicated to perfecting my application for Sarah Lawrence’s Consortium of Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education. The academic panel will select two students by March 15th to go to Malaysia over the summer to conduct ethnographic fieldwork on migrant life of Rohingya refugees. My conference work in two separate classes pertains to the crisis.

Through my Directing the Short Film class, I am directing and writing my first short film. Titled Fernanda, the film follows a teenage girl’s infiltration of a modern American family living in Upstate New York.

I was recently elected to the position of New Student at Large Senator in the Undergraduate Student Senate at Sarah Lawrence College. I serve as the representative for all first-year students. During my tenure, I hope to solve the increasingly insidious dilemma of loneliness among young people on campus (especially those who are queer and/or transgender).

As the acting treasurer of SLC's Queer Voice Coalition, I am working on securing a scholarship from the Diversity Advisory and Programming Subcommittee at school. With the funding, I hope to coordinate the school’s first annual Pride Picnic, a Sunday picnic on the South Lawn dedicated to amplifying the diverse voices of our community’s LGBTQIA+ students and faculty.

I am currently in classes for French language and French theater; they serve as preparation for my study abroad at either Sciences Po or the EICAR film school in Paris for the spring of next year.