Two Worlds at Once

I was in the second year of my undergraduate studies, taking Machine learning classes when ChatGPT was released, and something just clicked. I realized that even in a hyper-connected world, there is a lag where groundbreaking technologies can take days or weeks to reach a classroom halfway across the globe. I didn't want to be catching up; I wanted to be closer to the source. 

In 2024, I moved from Andhra Pradesh, India, to the U.S to pursue my Master’s in Data Science, a journey of ‘firsts’. It wasn’t just my first time boarding an airplane; it was also my first time navigating a new city, entirely on my own, after a life that had been relatively sheltered. My mother strongly believed in raising a daughter who could stand on her own, but, as is the custom in many Indian households, extended family and relatives play a significant role in shaping children’s decisions, and, in my family, views on how much independence a girl should have were often more conservative. As a result, I went to an all-girls school, rarely traveled alone, and was almost always accompanied when stepping out. I wasn’t incapable, but based on where I spent my childhood, I grew up in a place where I never had to fully rely on myself alone. 

Transitioning to life as a graduate student at Arizona State University was a constant balancing act: volunteering, staying engaged with technical projects, keeping pace with rapidly evolving tools, and, through it all, remaining grounded in my family and cultural roots. That culture shock showed up in very real, everyday mannerisms in the US; figuring out bureaucratic documents like lease agreements, credit requirements, and guarantors just to secure housing, and navigating an unfamiliar healthcare system while managing Polycystic Ovarian Disease (PCOD), all with associated costs and procedures that I had no prior context for. Even the small things, like how drinks always come with ice in the US or how many professors or supervisors allowed me to address them by their first names, required constant cultural adjustment, unlearning, and relearning.

Leaving home meant that the skepticism that still follows women going abroad back home followed me even in the USA; concerns about safety, independence, and reputation, often framed as care rather than restriction. It rarely sounded harsh or restrictive on the surface. It sounded like: “Call when you reach.” “Why do you need to go alone?”  “Is it really necessary to move so far?” “Who will take care of you there?” “Why can’t you just study in India and stay close to family?” Each question, on its own, came from a place of concern. But when those questions are repeated enough times, they planted little seeds of doubt in my own choices.

The doubt was confirmed early. In my second week, as I was waiting for public transportation to get me back to my apartment, a woman turned an ordinary bus ride into a lesson on whether I belonged; her outward expression of stigma and racism towards me turned what would have been a basic commute into a moment of genuine fear. One that I hoped would be a lone incident, but was not singular. What I didn't expect was how the body adapts to what the mind refuses to accept. As more incidents followed, some quieter and some louder, I learned to brush them off. I’m still not sure if that is resilience or a "quiet loss." The loss of the expectation that it shouldn't happen. I made a deliberate effort to treat those incidents as noise and focus on what I was here for.

But somewhere between brushing things off and pursuing my education despite those feelings, I found the people who understood, not only because they had seen similar scenes, but because they were also figuring out how to hold two worlds at once. I found that volunteering, for example, gave me a way to step outside my own experience and see that everyone around me was carrying something too; each of us from different places united in our journeys. For me, it might have been learning to move through spaces that didn't always want me there and grieving friendships that couldn't survive the change, but for my peers, it was also making international tuition work or the loneliness of a joke that doesn't land. We shared solidarity in knowing we were all carrying things. 

What struck me was the diversity of motivations for being at university. Some came to the USA to chase the American Dream, others sought hands-on learning that their home universities couldn't offer, and some came for the study abroad experience: the exposure, the stamp of a diploma from the United States, and everything in between. Beyond volunteering, ASU gave me a platform to take on new and exciting roles. Each role asked something different of me: the project lead who had to make decisions and stand behind them, the club member who had to show up consistently, the student worker learning on the job, the networker who had to walk into rooms full of strangers and find a way to belong, the emerging professional piecing together, how things worked here and where she fit within them.  It is in this way, this feature, that I believe makes universities irreplaceable; not just the curriculum, but the container. Universities create and enable conditions. Universities create space and place for people to discover what they are capable of when they are finally given the room to try.

These days, those once lighthearted questions like “Where are you from?” “What are you pursuing?” with peers, have turned into anxious conversations about careers. The anxiety is very specific, different from the early uncertainty of just being new somewhere; it is about whether the field you crossed oceans for is moving faster than you can keep up with. But I came to the US wanting to be close to where technology was actually evolving, and I got exactly that, just not in the way I imagined.  By the time I settled into my degree, the landscape had shifted again – ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini rapidly redefined what AI could do from when I was first introduced to them. Finishing my degree while the field reshapes itself around me is uncomfortable, but it is also exactly the right place to have learned from. University taught me that keeping up was never the point, it was to assess and adapt. Adapting was learning that Claude and ChatGPT were not a shortcut or a crutch, but a collaborator; that the skill was no longer knowing the answer but knowing the right question. It meant sitting with problems long enough to actually understand the direction before reaching for a tool that could solve them instantly, and learning to use AI to go further rather than to go faster. 

I’ve been thinking, as I approach graduation, was it worth it? Was the decision to leave home worth it? A lot of us, international students, came here having never left home before. Some of us, like myself, faced outright skepticism. But somewhere between arrival and now, I turned into someone who can navigate an unfamiliar city, an unfamiliar system, and now an unfamiliar future. None of the resilience and confidence I gained is a tangible thing that shows up on a transcript. It is the circle completed that I could leave everything familiar in pursuit of the unknown and master uncertainty, humility, fear, and build new things. It is the most real thing I am taking away.