Shreya Joshi: Open-Minded Approaches to Learning

I first got to know Shreya Joshi ’25 in a van.

Last semester, every Wednesday, we, along with a handful of others, would pile into an Amherst College van to drive to a jail in Northampton for the course “Justice.” At first, I connected with her over shared interests: We both worked in the Amherst Archives & Special Collections, we both were history majors, we even had the same advisor (shoutout Professor Redding).

But over the weeks, I realized I felt comfortable not just because of our overlapping interests, but also because of how she interacts with people. Our course dealt with a lot of controversial issues — including the 2024 election, abortion, and immigration — and many of the students who were inmates held more conservative views than the Amherst students. But Shreya was empathetic. 

“[I was] just thinking of what it means to be in community with others that don’t share your views on certain issues, but recognizing [their] humanity,” Shreya explained. “These aren’t … bad people, but there [are] so many factors that shape someone’s worldview.”

That is how she approaches everything she does. Maybe it is because she has lived in so many places (three continents!) and has met so many different types of people, maybe it is something else, but Shreya is always curious and compassionate toward different cultural experiences. Whether it’s thinking about the complicated town-gown dynamics at her previous college, Bates, or grappling with the exclusionary views of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in her thesis, Shreya comes in open-minded, ready to hear others’ perspectives.

Transcontinental Childhood

Shreya was born in India, but moved to the United Kingdom when she was one. She spent the next six-and-a-half years in the small town of Aldridge, and then they moved again, this time to Pune, India — the place she still calls home. 

However, Shreya felt that the idea of “home” for her isn’t grounded in a place. Since she has lived in so many places, home became less about the physical place she lived in, and more about the people she cares about. 

Shreya thought about what home meant when she attended UWC Mahindra, an international boarding school near Pune, during her junior and senior years of high school. During her senior year, due to Covid, all students had to stay on campus while school was in session. 

The school had students from all over the world, with more than 90 nationalities represented. With everyone far from their homes and families for longer periods than typical, they reconfigured what home meant for them and built a stronger community.

The multiculturalism of UWC Mahindra was new to Shreya, as the schools she attended prior were often racially and socioeconomically homogenous. But here, she was exposed to varying perspectives and cultures, and it shaped what she wanted in a community.

“Community doesn’t come in just one form. It doesn’t have to be this specific group of people,” she said. “People from different backgrounds come together, and that’s community. It’s a really particular feeling — you feel safe, you feel respected, you feel like people listen to you, you feel like people care about you.”

UWC Mahindra’s diversity also made Shreya feel more connected to her Indian identity.

“That was a really important time, [cementing] where I come from, and really understanding what it means to be Indian,” she said. “What are the aspects of my culture that I really value? Or what are the aspects of my own identity that I hold close to my heart?”

Not Like “Friends” at all

UWC Mahindra, through the Davis UWC Scholar Program, provided Shreya and many of her peers with scholarships to go to college in the United States. She applied hoping to get into Brown (lucky for us, she got rejected), but was accepted at Bates and Middlebury. Shreya had never seen any of these campuses and could not differentiate between them based on their websites, so she based her decision purely on financial aid — she was going to Bates.

Going to the international students’ orientation was the first time Shreya had ever been in the U.S. Her idea of American life was almost entirely based on movies and TV shows, but Bates did not look at all like “Friends.” It was in a “small, cute town” in rural Maine. The only store she could walk to was a Dunkin’ Donuts. 

“Not a lot going on around here,” Shreya remembered thinking.

While she found some community during the international students’ orientation, once the school year began, it felt like a “larger, more chaotic experience.” The rest of the student body was extremely white and wealthy (51% of the student body at Bates comes from the top 5%, which is one of the highest percentages among other elite schools). 

This extreme privilege was even more startling for Shreya because of the demographics of Lewiston. There was a huge level of economic diversity among town residents, who ranged from Mainers whose families had lived in Lewiston since it was a milltown to a large, mainly non-white refugee population. While she said that the Bates administration put in the effort to connect with the town community, Shreya found it “jarring” how separate the town versus the gown experiences were, and how students were not reckoning with these issues.

Another issue for her was the limited history courses offered at Bates. In high school, Shreya’s history classes made her think critically about European imperialism for the first time, and after learning about the case studies of India, Algeria, and South Africa, she knew she wanted to study African and Asian history. But the Bates history department did not have a ton of options for those regions, which made it difficult for Shreya to fully explore her interests.

She did form extremely close friendships during her time at Bates, which sustained her even as she grew increasingly frustrated with her school. (Shreya has kept these ties — one of them was actually coming to visit her after we finished our interview.)

But during her freshman year winter break, she stayed with one of her UWC friends at the College of the Atlantic, and everything clicked for her.

“Seeing just how happy he was, and seeing how much of a community he had found, and seeing his friends, and the way he talked about the place, and his excitement for showing me around — that really made me think more critically about my own experience and how I wasn’t really excited to go back,” Shreya said.

She decided to transfer. The process was extremely laborious, especially since she was an international student. Amherst was one of the only schools that had need-blind admissions for international transfer students, which was a huge factor for her. But this time around, Shreya also talked to someone who was already attending — Snigdha Ranjan ’25, another UWC Mahindra alum — which helped her know Amherst was the right fit for her. 

Deep Down Underground (The Archives)

Shreya’s time at Amherst started out with a bang — literally. The first time she stepped foot on the  Amherst campus, an active shooter alarm went off.

“We [had] just been outside, [and then we were] pushing the dresser over the door. Oh, my God, we all just sat there, like, ‘What do we do?’” Shreya said.

It was a system malfunction, and there was no active shooter. Luckily, this false alarm was the only part of Shreya’s introduction to Amherst that went awry. She lived in Seligman, where all transfers were roomed together. Although the dorm was far from the rest of campus, being in close proximity to others who were all in the same situation meant that she was part of a tight-knit community immediately.

She also found community working in the Archives and Special Collections. Shreya had heard about the archives, and when she saw the job listing, she knew she had to apply. Before she was two months into her time at Amherst, she was hired, and she has worked there ever since.

“It’s just been such an amazing experience — getting to know all the material we have, just getting to work with it so closely, and actually take charge of your own projects and initiatives. And just the community itself is so sweet,” Shreya said.

Shreya said her favorite project was when she worked with the diaries of Sarah Archer Amherst, the wife of India’s governor general in the 1820s. Public Services Manager Mimi Dakin knew that Shreya had been researching sati — the Hindu practice of widow burning, which was abolished in the 19th century — and thought she could maybe find some relevant information through the diaries about the practice.

Looking through these diaries was a “painful process,” as Shreya had to teach herself to decipher centuries-old cursive. 

Once she could read it, Shreya discovered that although there were not a ton of references to sati, it contained a lot of valuable information about colonial Indian life.

To help scholars understand what was in the diaries, Shreya went page by page and documented important events and keywords mentioned on each, eventually turning it into an extremely thorough finding aid (an online resource for researchers to understand what the materials contain). After having struggled to read the diaries, she also made a library guide to help students with paleography, the study of deciphering ancient handwriting.

Despite her love for the archives, it was only the summer before her junior year that Shreya did her own independent archival research. She was part of a colloquium taught by Professor of History Ellen Boucher called “Migrant Lives,” and as part of that, she and five other students went to the U.K. to conduct original research about how Black nurses navigated institutional hierarchies in the National Health Service from the 1960s to 1980s.

“We were looking at oral histories and immigration papers … and just like internal correspondence between government officials, when the laws are changing. And that was just so crazy to read because there were papers saying the law is going to change, and we won’t be able to discriminate in this way, but we can subvert it by doing [these things],” she explained.

Shreya and the other students co-wrote a journal article based on this research, which was published this year.

That experience with doing her own archival research prepared her for her thesis. Shreya examined how the RSS — a far-right, all-male, Hindu nationalist, volunteer organization in India — has developed since its founding in 1925 and its influence on the modern political climate. The topic was personal for her, not just because it was relevant to Indian politics she cared about, but also because she has relatives who are members of the RSS.

“Growing up, [I’ve been] trying to reconcile with these ideas and what it means for these people whom I care about and love [to] hold such exclusionary views of the Indian nation,” Shreya explained.

Shreya thought it was important for her work to emphasize that the people who make up the RSS can both be “ordinary” people and harbor harmful and prejudiced ideologies. Still, she evaluated the historical actors from a place of empathy.

“You can’t go at it thinking these are bad people. You can’t come at it thinking you’re in a superior position of knowing what is right and wrong, because [that] is really based off of a lot of different factors that I, myself, cannot say I’m superior enough to understand,” Shreya said. “Different people have different motivations. And as a historian, one of the things is you need to be empathetic … to the different motivations and understanding why certain people may hold certain views, even though you may not necessarily agree with them.”

As part of her thesis research, Shreya got funding to go to the Prime Minister’s Museum and Library in Delhi, India, for two weeks. Her previous experiences with archives — both as an employee and as a researcher — helped tremendously. Still, the institution had rules that made it difficult to access the sources she wanted, even if she had archival experience.

All the sources were on microfilm, which was a technology she had little experience with. Moreover, researchers could not take photos of sources, and getting scans cost more money than her funding allowed. So, Shreya had to transcribe every document and was unable to study all the materials she had initially planned to. 

Even with these hurdles, Shreya loved working on her thesis. She, like many thesis students, emphasized that the process is brutal, but that if you find a topic you’re truly passionate about, it will be worth it.

Over the course of her journey at Amherst, Shreya has grown more confident with everything she does. She told me that as a kid, she saw how her parents always put her in the best schools, even if it created financial burdens for them. As a result, she always put a lot of pressure on herself and was extremely driven.

“I wanted to live for them, for myself,” Shreya said.

When she came to Amherst, despite this strong work ethic, she felt impostor syndrome at first.

“Everyone here is so smart in ways, and they have so many passions and interests, and they’re doing 100 things on campus. [It makes you think,] ‘What makes you worthy enough to be in this place?’” she said. 

But over her time at Amherst, Shreya has gained confidence and a sense of belonging.

“She has definitely come out of her shell a lot more,” Emily Norry ’25, Shreya’s friend, said. “She’s a lot more confident and happy than when she started at Amherst, and she’s just way more sure of herself.”

One More Home

After graduation, Shreya is finding a new home once again — this time in Washington, D.C. She received the prestigious Gaither Junior Fellowship, as only one of 15 students who were accepted this year (another Amherst student, Jaden Richards ’25, also received it). As part of the fellowship, she will be a research assistant in the democracy, conflict, and governance program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Shreya felt that policy work could be a great fit for her, even if she had never worked in the field before.

“I love research, but I wanted to see how to make my research more applicable … instead of just remaining within the walls of academia,” Shreya explained.

Through this position, and whatever she decides to do, Shreya is committed to making a positive impact.

“Shreya really cares about the people around her and the people in the world in general,” Norry said. “She really wants to make the world a better place.”