I grew up in a small village in Andhra Pradesh, India, where my parents are farmers. There were no engineers in my family tree, no one who had sat in a university lecture hall, and certainly no one who had studied abroad. When I decided to pursue a degree in Computer Science, and later a master's degree in the United States, I was not following a path. I was making one. Being a first-generation student means carrying a particular kind of weight. Every application, every deadline, every financial decision was something I navigated without a guide. I did not know what a personal statement was supposed to sound like. I did not know how American graduate admissions worked, what a co-op program meant, or how to build a professional network from scratch in a country I had never lived in. I figured it out, slowly and imperfectly, the way first-generation students always do. The obstacles were not only logistical. Leaving a farming village in Andhra Pradesh to study in Boston is a cultural leap as much as a geographic one. I arrived in a city where I knew almost no one, in a program that moved fast and assumed a lot, funded entirely by an education loan my family took on with no guarantee of return. The financial pressure has been constant. The 13% merit scholarship Northeastern awarded me helped, but the gap between that and the full cost of an international graduate degree is wide. Every semester, my parents carry debt they took on so I could be here. What kept me grounded was community. I co-lead Queer Curry, a South Asian LGBTQ+ organization at Northeastern, where I work to build belonging for students who exist at intersections that most institutions were not designed for. I volunteer with Gay For Good Boston, contributing to service projects across the city. These are not extracurriculars to me. They are how I stay connected to the reason I came here in the first place: not just to build a career, but to build something that matters. I am studying Information Systems and building a career in product management. I believe the best products are built by people who understand what it means to be underserved, overlooked, or left out of the design process entirely. That is the perspective I bring to my work, and it comes directly from where I grew up and who I am. My plan is not complicated. I want to work on technology that solves real problems for real people, bring the discipline and drive of someone who had to earn every opportunity, and eventually give back to communities like the one I came from. First-generation students from farming families in rural India do not often end up in graduate programs at research universities in the United States. I intend to make that visibility count.

The American dream, as I understood it growing up in India, was simple: go to America, work hard, and build a life. It sounded clean and linear. It wasn't until I actually came here that I realized the dream is far messier, far more personal, and far more contested than any postcard version suggests. My definition of the American dream is not arrival. It's becoming. I came to Boston as a first-generation international student from Chennai, India, pursuing a Master's in Information Systems at Northeastern University. No one in my family had done this before. There was no alumni network to call, no relative who knew what a co-op was, no one to tell me which scholarships to apply for or how American graduate school actually works. I figured it out the way most first-generation students do: slowly, imperfectly, and with a lot of quiet determination. But here's what I didn't expect. The hardest part of being here wasn't the academics or the visa paperwork or even the financial pressure of studying abroad. It was finding community. As a queer South Asian student, I existed at an intersection that most spaces weren't built for. I had to build it myself. So I did. I co-lead Queer Curry, a South Asian LGBTQ+ organization at Northeastern, where we create space for students who are navigating the same tension I felt: being deeply tied to a culture that doesn't always have language for who you are. I volunteer with Gay For Good Boston, showing up for a city that took me in. These aren't resume lines to me. They're the places where I've practiced what I actually believe the American dream means. To me, the American dream is the freedom to build something that didn't exist before you got here. It's not guaranteed comfort or automatic opportunity. It's the conditions to try. For undocumented students, for international students, for first-generation students, those conditions are never equal. The barriers are real and they are expensive, financially and emotionally. A scholarship like this one doesn't just cover tuition. It covers the cost of staying in the fight when everything around you is telling you this path wasn't made for you. I'm not chasing a dream someone else designed. I'm building one that looks like me: queer, brown, immigrant, ambitious, and deeply committed to making the communities I belong to stronger than I found them. That, to me, is the American dream worth pursuing.