Highlight of Recent Alumni

Community Engagement Coordinator, South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA) in Philadelphia. SAADA is a non-profit and community-based organization.

How did your Global Studies background prepare you for this role?

Training in the Global Studies Program helped me develop a global consciousness of local and regional events and issues. Bringing this consciousness is crucial to my work since I work with South Asian American communities and diaspora. Understanding global processes and their impacts on communities and locales is essential to my work. Having been trained in the Global Studies Program at Swarthmore, the global-local connections take on a different meaning, I try to look for connections between the United States and South Asia. This helps me situate myself and the South Asian American communities I work with in the critical conversations around exclusion, belonging, and representation. For example, being familiarized with global migration and its linkages with American capitalism in the Global Studies Program gives me a deeper understanding of the mobility and movement of South Asian communities that are settled in the United States.

Environmental Analyst, Clean Transportation Group

How did your Global Studies background prepare you for this role?

My global studies education allowed me to dive into my interest in climate change and environment-related issues from an intersectional and inter-regional perspective, exposing me to the scale and multidimensional nature of the issues we are facing as not only a country, but as a planet. It provided me with an interdisciplinary background and critical lens for the science and research driven work that I’m going to be conducting as part of different contacts for different federal agencies in this first step in my professional career.