January 9, 2024

Familiarity on a New Campus

After a more stomach-twisting weekend than planned, I found myself missing home and familiarity. Today was our first day at BMS College of Engineering and being on campus and around new peers brought a feeling of home. The day began with a lecture from Bhargavi about a few of the many projects the Environmental Support Group is working on in and around Bangalore. The projects Bhargavi and her team are working on are very similar to environmental projects I’ve worked on in Seattle and answered many of the questions I’ve had while exploring Bangalore over the past few days. Next we toured the campus with a BMS student who showed us their favorite spots and very casually told us about their hobbies of building rockets and researching ways to reuse lithium batteries. We were even given a behind the scenes look at BMS’s many trophies by the sports center manager who boasted that BMS is #1 in all sports. Our tour guide let us in on the secret that the only recent trophies are from the college’s chess team. We were even welcomed into a pickup cricket game on campus and shown some of the ropes. After lunch and the tour, we returned to the classroom to get to know our new peers a little bit better, by walking in their shoes literally. Getting to explore our empathetic strengths allowed us to realize some of the internal struggles our peers faced and even gave us insight for what might come to question as we interview different communities for our organization. Through a few different exercises, we got to know our BMS peers and practice interviewing. Again and again, me and my partners would find common ground with our experiences, like losing keys or forgetting your student id on the way to class. During the last set of interview questions, I asked my partner what was one of her favorite parts of her childhood, and she told me it was playing in the sand and making sand dosas. When she was the interviewer, she asked me the same question, and I told her one of my favorite parts of growing up was playing in the mud in my backyard making mud pies and mud bones for my dogs. We bonded over such a simple childhood activity and talked about how we missed the feeling of the fresh sand or the red clay that sifted through our feet.

By Nantahala