Today's SIS blog written by Gayatri Murthy,
As I begin my final week of my first semester here at AU’s School of International Service, it is easy for me to see that choosing to study International Communications at SIS was one of the best decisions of my life. As an international student, having lived my whole life in one place and never dared to move out of my comfort zone, I was eager to venture into new horizons, explore the world around me and challenge myself to the greatest extreme. And the School of International Service was all that and more.
My experience so far has been overwhelming. I feel as if I have been using only a small portion of my brain and every day in the International Communication program is a challenge. I can almost feel little neurons in my brain waking up to this vast pool of knowledge every minute. My classes make me think in directions I have never thought before. I felt a similar surge of emotions in my freshman year of college in India, when I was grappling with new concepts and ideas for the first time. At that time, I thought it was the spirit of being in college and just a passing idealist phase. But now I truly believe that ideas truly drive the world as we know it. As Churchill says, “"the empires of the future are the empires of the mind”, and I know this is the most ideal breeding ground for the best the world has to offer. Besides being this melting pot of divergent, yet interesting intellectual viewpoints, the most special quality at SIS is its sense of community. It is a forum for all voices, and the spirit of SIS encourages all these voices to co-exist and indeed, enhance one’s own intellectual growth. In my classes, or even in the Davenport, I have never encountered a brutal sense of competition, so typical of most professional schools. My transition as an international student couldn’t have been easier. I have met some of the most dynamic and diverse people here, whom I am proud to call my friends and I could not be happier to be right here at this point in my life.
On the flipside there are several underlying, yet complex themes to life as an international student. Since I came from an upper middle class, urban and English speaking background, I was lucky enough to not experience a great deal of culture shock or language barriers. But being far away from home, from one’s comfort zone makes you question your identity, your sense of belonging, the contribution of culture to your sense of being and myriad other questions which generally don’t have easy answers. As I count the days to Christmas break when I go back home (Bombay, India), I am once again filled with bittersweet feelings. I can not wait to go back home and yet a part of me feels at home in DC as well. Sometimes when you’re a foreign student, you run the danger of being out of context in all your contexts. As a student here, I constantly deal with explaining the origins of my points of views, and sometimes when I talk to friends and family back home; it becomes hard to contextualize all of my new experiences easily, in a way that they both truly understand me.
There are no solutions to this unique dichotomy and longing. But Grad school, for everyone alike, can be a quest to find one’s identity and it need not be a tiresome task. Instead, it can (and quite frankly is) the journey of a lifetime. You can’t hurry self discovery and a little patience makes the ride a lot more meaningful than the destination itself.
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