Rudrani Gangopadhyay

I am a doctoral candidate in the program in Comparative Literature at Rutgers. My academic writing has appeared in MELOW Journal of World Literature, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, and the Bloomsbury volume Global Modernists on Modernism, and is forthcoming in the Journal of Urban Cultural and The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures. In addition to my academic work as a graduate researcher and an instructor, my keen interest in the administrative end of the academy has led me to serve as a Graduate Coordinator for the Urban Humanities Working Group at the Center for Critical Analysis and the Critical Translation Studies Institute. In the 2020-2021 AY, I was a Pre-Doctoral Leadership Academy Fellow with the Rutgers Center for Organizational Leadership and was a Rutgers Honors College Graduate Mentor Fellow in the 2018-2019 AY. Since 2019, I have also had the privilege to serve as a leader for the TA Project, training international teaching assistants.

In terms of my piece of advice to students about career exploration, the short answer is to keep an open mind. The long answer to expanding on that would be to remember that there is no one single career track that fits everyone anymore (if there ever was such a thing). It is beneficial to explore what might feel like non-traditional options. Everyone’s journey is unique, and none of the skills one acquires along the way go wasted.