Aarushi Arora

Jasmine Hilton
Thu, 30 Apr 2020 02:20:52 +0000
Hilton-SP2020

Aarushi Arora, a first-year in engineering, isn’t too far from home at Ohio State — just 13 miles from Dublin, Ohio. Growing up with a single parent who worked in customer service, doing all she could to support her three daughters, Arora felt shut out of her affluent suburban community.

“I was raised by both of my parents in Albion, Michigan, until they got a divorce when I was 7. My mom and dad owned a family business, and because of the divorce, it all went under my dad’s name, and my mom was left with nothing.”

“As a result of that, she had to find another job. Because we lived in a lower socioeconomic community, the education system was not very good. Since my parents are immigrants from India, the only person my mom knew in the U.S. was a family friend who lived in Dublin, Ohio. She decided to take the risk of starting over, and moving there to Dublin, so my younger sister and I could have a better life and education.”

“My dad would never pay child support. We were very out of our budget to live there. I felt like nobody really understood my story, and people were kind of just on a completely different page.”

“I felt like most people’s families were so much farther ahead and well-off. It’s like, what they have today is what my goal is in the future. Their basis is what I’m striving for. People like me were underrepresented in my community.”

“I appreciated how hard my mom worked to make sure that I had a really good education and was in a very safe community. She really valued those things. But then, being a single parent, an Indian woman working in customer service and not really having a high-paying job, she couldn’t really connect with the people around her. My family didn’t really have connections within our community, and so we kind of felt excluded.”

“My mom wanted me to go to a specific middle school within Dublin through open enrollment. So I would have to go back and forth, between our apartment complex surrounded by other families with the same dynamic, and school, where I would be surrounded by kids who live in these big houses and drive in Mercedes and BMWs. I kind of always felt like I never really fit in.”

“I would never be able to hang out with people after school because I lived so far. In middle school, it was harder making friends because I would kind of get shut out. I gave up, and I was trying to understand, ‘Why do people think I’m different? Why am I not fitting in?’”

“People would talk about their families, their friends, their extended family and their home life, and it’s like, I don’t have anything to contribute to that because I can’t relate.”

“They would make jokes about people who’ve experienced similar situations as me and pretend like these circumstances didn’t exist. I felt like if I just said, ‘Hey, that’s actually my life,” they would disregard it and judge me for it automatically because they were ignorant toward the lives of people who have less than them.”

“My older sister and my mom were really there for guidance. They were like, ‘There’s nothing wrong with you. Don’t feel bad about yourself. People might not want to know more about you. It’s because your story is different from them and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just different circumstances and different ways that you were brought up.’”

“These words carried with me through high school. Fortunately, the high school that I went to had both ends of the spectrum as far as economic opportunity.”?

“That’s when I started to notice, ‘OK, there’s people like me, too.’ It kind of made me accept who I am a little bit more. The older I got, the better it got just because I was surrounded by more people like me.”

“In college, I want to understand that it’s OK to not be perfect, like understanding more so my personality, and that it’s OK to branch out. Even if some people don’t like me, that’s OK because there will be other people that will appreciate me for who I am.”

“I’ve definitely seen growth, even in just one semester here. I think I’ve had more solid connections with people here than I’ve had in my whole life. It’s only been, like, a semester and a half, and I’m already getting the most out of college that I can and I’m really trying to put myself out there. I just know that there will be personal growth in the next four years.”