Journey of Vassar's 1st International President of the Student Council

Early days in Vassar

Went into Vassar with no expectations, only knowing it was Liberal Arts college and had seen some pictures on the internet. The campus was beautiful, with very welcoming and supportive people around. They had separate orientation for international students and then regular orientation. Having very regular interactions with professors and being in a 10% classroom, developed our relationship with them very well. They have several events on campus which were a mix of adjusting and forming bonds at an early stage. 

Resources available at Vassar for the two Majors

Anish’s interests in political science and economics were very different but he wanted to learn them more and decided to do a major in both. Economics he had done in school before so had some ideas, but political science he had never done. In the first semester he took both and his interest grew so decided to do them. He spent an hour discussing a doubt which he thought would be cleared in a minute or two. 

He was most influenced by his close friends and professors, shared experiences and learnt a lot of different perspectives. It was all a very meaningful exchange. With his professors, he would spend hours talking and listening to music, having a very fun relationship. 

Manage time while doing two majors

Graduation requirements at Vassar are very little, one needs to take one class in each division. The curriculum is not very rigid and one has complete freedom to explore whatever you want specifically in political science. The topics covered were comparative politics, political theory, and so on, and so forth. So the thing students focused on was a subset of all of that, which was post colonial theory which he had chosen to study further. Like how colonialism and imperialism in many ways have shaped our world and ways of thinking. So in theory, dealing with the subset and to recognize and pushback against it. In economics, one has micro, macro, micro finance, his focus was on macro. The overlap is that one doesn’t go without the other. 

Refugee Initiative and Student Government 

Co-founded the refugee initiative with a professor. Today it is a seven college consortium funded by Mellon Foundation for $1.5 million. The beauty at Vassar is that they have the professors to guide and the structure available to do something meaningful, everyone will support you. There were challenges from time to time. They opened a resettlement office in the local community and resettled a few people. A lot of language exchanges where the refugees taught us Arabic and we taught them English, we helped them get jobs, arranged interviews, artist exchanges over summer, even helped some get on track for college education. Some forced migrants had bigger challenges in the world, some were inter-border migrants like in Indian states, Syrian or American or German, in these situations they come to the border, and want to call your home as their home. A lot of push back comes, against it based on the history of your country. The depth of it he found quite mind-boggling. 

1st International President of the Student Government at Vassar

Most pivotal experiences of college life, he had as the President of the Student Government. Due to the position, he got to sit in the Board of Trustees meetings as well as all student organizations. They had close to a million dollar budget, which they had complete independence over whom to allocate. The main task was finding a balance of activism and real need for social justice, and making sure the administration understood it. The trustees were from different walks of life, like one grew up in France, there was a former chief economist of World bank, a person who ran a theatre in Broadway. 

Rapid Fire 

Three adjectives that define him/ his strengths, would be the desire to learn, then leadership component and third was analysis. 

Advice to high school students 

The biggest thing he feels is not to stress and so do your research. He did not put in effort to apply and somehow still got in. Had no idea where he would join but those are all circumstantial things that turned out quite well for him. He advises not to overthink or go overboard with too much information. One never knows enough or you’re never going to know it all. He encourages students to be courageous and don’t do what people expect you to do but what you want to do.