As a journalist, i am interested in pursuing stories of international students and their specific experiences as students at Brandeis. An international student myself, i feel each of us has unique experiences to reveal relating to cultural transition, interactions and lifestyle changes. There is a lot to learn from anybody’s story especially to gain understanding and empathy, in a more general domain, to everybody’s life choices. The best way to convey this much needed tolerance and empathy is through media and its many fronts. It’ll enable us to reach the widest audience.
Campus was recently and for the first time struck with thunder due to the horrifying bomb scare. During the first week of orientation for the incoming freshmen, a number of schools and public structures in Waltham were threatened with bombings. At home, back in India, when i was first made aware of the emergency and lockdown taking place in campus along with the numerous security procedures, i was petrified for the students and personnel on campus and what their families must be going through. But despite the cascade of important situations and issues to be dealt with Brandeis provided the students on campus as well as off campus with a strong front, informing everybody continuously about the progress. The students, bonded together, worked to raise each other’s spirits and provide support. As i returned to campus, i could sense the strength Brandeis as a whole, established during those trying hours. Everybody’s favourite freshmen orientation event ‘This Is Our House’ truly took on its meaning with its posters of ‘Love is Love’ all over campus. Fear has a way of bonding people but Brandeis rose above with strength and unity.
Mumbai,India faced a trying time in its own way. The day i was flying out, a thunderstorm, enveloped the city and with incessant rain and heavy lightening the city was engulfed in chaos. Its trains stopped working while people remained stranded inside in the dark, the roads were flooding and the city came to a complete halt. Flights were cancelled and cars were submerged. But the city of Mumbai isn’t a quitter, numerous people came out to help the firemen and policemen to rescue stranded people and animals.They banded together to provide clothing, food and shelter in their own houses to those stranded. Although smaller in its capacity, the Mumbai floods of 29th August mimicked the disastrous Hurricane Harvey, and yet there was the same message to take home from all these incidents. Looking out for each other and the world around us is the only way to recover and move forward and without this sentiment of being selfless, there is no future.