{"id":1066,"date":"2020-04-30T02:20:52","date_gmt":"2020-04-30T02:20:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/?p=1066"},"modified":"2020-04-30T02:20:53","modified_gmt":"2020-04-30T02:20:53","slug":"aarushi-arora","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/2020\/04\/30\/aarushi-arora\/","title":{"rendered":"Aarushi Arora"},"content":{"rendered":"

[et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ _builder_version=”3.22″][et_pb_row _builder_version=”3.25″ background_size=”initial” background_position=”top_left” background_repeat=”repeat”][et_pb_column type=”4_4″ _builder_version=”3.25″ custom_padding=”|||” custom_padding__hover=”|||”][et_pb_text _builder_version=”3.27.4″ background_size=”initial” background_position=”top_left” background_repeat=”repeat”]\u201cI 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\u2019s name, and my mom was left with nothing.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAs 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.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMy 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.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI felt like most people\u2019s families were so much farther ahead and well-off. It\u2019s like, what they have today is what my goal is in the future. Their basis is what I\u2019m striving for. People like me were underrepresented in my community.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI 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\u2019t really connect with the people around her. My family didn\u2019t really have connections within our community, and so we kind of felt excluded.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMy 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.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI 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, \u2018Why do people think I\u2019m different? Why am I not fitting in?\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cPeople would talk about their families, their friends, their extended family and their home life, and it\u2019s like, I don\u2019t have anything to contribute to that because I can\u2019t relate.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThey would make jokes about people who\u2019ve experienced similar situations as me and pretend like these circumstances didn\u2019t exist. I felt like if I just said, \u2018Hey, that\u2019s actually my life,\u201d they would disregard it and judge me for it automatically because they were ignorant toward the lives of people who have less than them.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMy older sister and my mom were really there for guidance. They were like, \u2018There\u2019s nothing wrong with you. Don\u2019t feel bad about yourself. People might not want to know more about you. It\u2019s because your story is different from them and there\u2019s nothing wrong with that. It\u2019s just different circumstances and different ways that you were brought up.\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThese 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.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s when I started to notice, \u2018OK, there\u2019s people like me, too.\u2019 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.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIn college, I want to understand that it\u2019s OK to not be perfect, like understanding more so my personality, and that it\u2019s OK to branch out. Even if some people don\u2019t like me, that\u2019s OK because there will be other people that will appreciate me for who I am.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Aarushi Arora, a first-year in engineering, isn\u2019t too far from home at Ohio State \u2014 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4076,"featured_media":1035,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"on","_et_pb_old_content":"

\u201cI 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\u2019s name, and my mom was left with nothing.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u201cThese 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.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u201cI\u2019ve definitely seen growth, even in just one semester here. I think I\u2019ve had more solid connections with people here than I\u2019ve had in my whole life. It\u2019s only been, like, a semester and a half, and I\u2019m already getting the most out of college that I can and I\u2019m really trying to put myself out there. I just know that there will be personal growth in the next four years.\u201d<\/span><\/p>","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"coauthors":[13],"class_list":["post-1066","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-hilton-sp2020"],"acf":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/files\/2020\/04\/Aarushi-Arora-2-1.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1066","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4076"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1066"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1066\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1079,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1066\/revisions\/1079"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1035"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1066"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=1066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}