On A Day Without Immigrants, education in this country would be very different. Pictured above: my parents outside their international student family housing while they were beginning their Doctoral training at Southern Methodist University in the early 1990s. A couple years later I immigrated to the US when I was just five.
Several years later we became American citizens, and now more than ever I realize the privilege I had to apply to US universities with this status. Recently I experienced being an immigrant student in the UK, which opened my eyes to a lot of international issues regarding the issue. With this privilege and knowledge I hold, I will help fight for my fellow immigrants in academia to continue to study, teach and work in this country.
Pictured below: me in the middle at my undergraduate graduating from Indiana University in 2010. Say what you will about Indiana as a state, but the university is a beacon of international intellectual activity. To the left is Heather, my college roommate from Indiana who spent her free time and degree in International Relations traveling across the world exploring other countries. To the right is Stephanie, a fellow immigrant one of my closest friends in college, originally from Mumbai, lived in Australia, studied at an international high school in the mountains of Tibet, and lived in Indiana, California and New York. This is America.
Stefania Marghitu 