The View Between Graduations
By: Pranati Wadhawan, Staff Writer
Read while listening to: "You’re On Your Own, Kid" by Taylor Swift & Jack Antoff
In May 2019, I was sitting in the blistering heat at Yankee Stadium in my bright purple graduation gown (the first of two, unbeknownst to me), absorbing the words of celebrated poet Elizabeth Alexander. I was graduating NYU—a wide eyed, hopeful, ambitious 22-year-old, ready to take the world by storm. I knew so much then—where my career would take me, where I wanted to live, who I wanted to surround myself with, and most importantly, who I was. Or so I thought.
Counting down to my second graduation in a deep purple graduation gown, I now know how misplaced I was about the ideals of the world and of myself I had. The hike between these two graduations hasn’t been linear—it was deep valleys, exhilarating peaks, and the climbs and descents in between. Looking back, my pack looks completely different, and so do I. So consider what follows less a list of lessons and more an unpacking of the backpack—five things I’ve picked up, had to put down, and am carrying into whatever comes next.
1. Close the character–integrity gap. The world is so much more nuanced than it seems on the cusp of any graduation. Since that day in Yankee Stadium, I’ve had to make decisions that felt like little tests from the universe time and time again. How to confront a friendship as it dissolves, when the person you trusted turns against you for no apparent reason. How to deal with the boss that is discriminatory—should I report it or handle it with grace even though they don’t deserve it? How should I stand up for my political and moral beliefs in a world where the dominant voice is starkly against it? Should I express dissent on social media or do the work privately?
These are all situations that have tested my sense of self before I even know what it was, and I did what I thought was right to me in the moment. Inevitably, there will be a multitude of more such situations in our future. What I realize now is that the choices and the pressure of making these in moments was silently carving my self identity. So, I periodically look back at these moments and challenge and myself to ask: was it who I wanted to be? How would I have done things differently, and what changes for me moving forward? My goal here is to close the gap between my integrity, values, and my character as it stands today to get closer to my truest sense of self, which will then inform who I become as a leader, friend, and partner.
2. Master the catch and release. For my entire life, I’ve focused on making myself smaller. That’s something I can thank my high school bullies for. Whether it was physically chasing a smaller body type or caring more about what others thought of me than what I actually believed, I used to always try and shrink into the edges. I’d been told for a large part of my life that I didn’t have anything intelligent or interesting to say. Until one day when my boss at my first job saw right through it.
In a meeting where we were trying to backtrack from losing a client because of legal complications, she asked me what I thought in a room of senior executives. I was the most junior, unseasoned salesperson there. But she created space for me—up for me to grab. When I suggested a workaround I’d been mulling over, I remember her smiling and saying it was exactly what we needed. From then on, she made space for me at every table and every team meeting. Through her, I realized I had been holding onto everything people ever told me—and my pack was full of weight that was never mine to carry. I needed to drop that weight. So, I learned to release: release any notion that didn’t sit right with who I thought I was.
I learned to stop auditioning for belonging and started to stand in my thoughts and actions with steadier feet. The constant vigilance required to maintain universal appeal is a farce put in place to keep us small and quiet. We cannot carry all things—things people said to us in moments of anger, updates on someone who treated us poorly. We are not the sum of people’s projections on us in their worst moments.
If we learn what to keep, pack only what we need, and release the rest, we grow into our own confidence.
3. People can only meet you as far as they’ve met themselves. As a rule of thumb, I always over index on people and under-index on the day-to-day. If you know me, you know this about me. I pride myself on showing up; it’s something I value and build my character on (see point 1). So, as with any thing that requires balance, I’ve simultaneously had to discipline myself on knowing when to not show up.
At the start of Kellogg, I would enter rooms trying to impress everyone because I was auditioning for belonging in this new, social experiment-y environment (see point 2). And on many occasions, I’d leave feeling over exposed because I felt the need to reveal something about myself that I didn’t want to, just to try and create connection or get a laugh out of a group. Ironically, I left feeling neither connected nor funny.
At the same time, I’d get incredibly frustrated by what I fondly call ‘The Kellogg Flake’—you know, the flood of ISO’s that hit #tickets the day of an event. Remember, I pride myself on showing up, so this goes deeply against my character. Yet, over time, and over many a conversation with friends, I’ve come to realize two things:
1) Everyone’s life is shaped by their lived experience, and none of us can claim to know 100% of anyone, and therefore:
2) I can’t hold others to the expectations I have for myself. People can only meet you as far as they’ve met themselves; the more we can detach from the version of others we are looking for, and the more we can be generous in getting to know someone, the more we curb any disappointment. Be curious, not judgmental.
4. Love is something to be built, not found. I moved to New York from India at age 17, by myself, with no family in the states at the time. Knowing what I know now about how hard immigration is—not just in the process, but in day-to-day living—I question how anyone let me make that decision before I was even an official adult. I’ve spent many university breaks alone in my dorm room, yearning for family and community. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit and between travel and visa restrictions, I didn’t get to see my family for over two years.
Through the storms—both literal and figurative—and without realizing, I was slowly cultivating something to fill this gap. It first came in the form of a Thanksgiving invite from my friend, knowing I wouldn’t make it home for break, and making sure she made me a vegetarian version of Thanksgiving dinner.
It then came in the form of my high school best friend FaceTiming me every day when she knew I was working from home and studying for the GMAT at the same time, spending over 14 hours on my desk, knowing I needed a laugh.
Soon after, it came the day I was moving into my first big girl apartment, living alone in NYC, and 14 of my friends showed up to help move me, knowing my parents wanted to make it but couldn’t.
At Kellogg, it’s come from my girlfriends realizing I hadn’t tried a single suburban fast-food chain having not grown up here and making a tour list for us to visit just so I could experience it. It’s come from my friend building a casing schedule for me when I didn’t land a consulting job on the first try, even though it was the last thing he probably wanted to do. Without realizing, I’d built a stand-in chosen family. These things may seem trivial, but they’re embodiments of kintsugi, the centuries old Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold. When we do this, the repaired object comes out stronger, more resilient, and often more valuable than it was before. These weren’t people I just found who decided to give me love. This was a foundation built together by constantly showing up, holding up, and not giving up, especially when we most wanted to.
So, when it comes time for the tremors, the gold threading holds the cracks together, and we can take up space without burdening those who love us, because the foundation is rock solid. I don’t subscribe to the idea of “you’ll find love when you least expect it” or “finding your soulmate,” I think you have to build those people into your life. Build your village, because it truly takes one.
5. Everything is a win when the goal is to experience. To my fellow Type-A, overachieving Kellogg students and grads: a win is not synonymous with a tangible achievement. To put this into perspective, I like to categorize the opposite of a win—a failure—into two categories: an operating failure, and an experiential failure. An operating failure looks like not showing up on time, committing to do something and not getting to it or not holding yourself accountable for your responsibilities. It lives in the day-to-day and usually chalks up to overwhelm or procrastination. It has easy fixes.
An experiential failure, on the other hand, is when you aim for something such as a consulting offer, a tech PM role, or starting your own business, and it doesn’t work out. You stretched, and you missed. While the miss might seem like a failure, the win lies in the stretch—that time you committed that made you understand how much you can push yourself and the space you created to get to something outside your comfort zone that made you understand just how much capacity you have for learning new things. It gave you a perspective on how much you can stretch, just in a different direction. Sometimes, the ‘failure’ comes from not understanding that the stretch is where you grow, and if you’re growing from experience, you’re winning.
A guest speaker in one of my classes recently said “failure can guide you to the ask”—sometimes we're so afraid of looking dumb that we pretend we have all the answers and end up so lost we have to ask for help anyway. That experience is a win in itself. The ask brings us to new people and new doors, that we can and should walk through. And then when we do get our win—our goal in the net—let’s not move the goalpost before you’ve had a chance to celebrate.
So, as we step into this next phase of our life—this one that feels longer and less structured—I hope you can take inventory of your own bag. Know what to cherish and know what deserves a cleanout. And if you noticed, my NYU graduation gown was bright purple, but my Kellogg one is deep purple. That’s the view between graduations. Read More Personal Essays: The Tragedy of Nonchalance and The Commons of Community The MBA Birthday: A Social Case Study The Luck:Failure Ratio of Kellogg Navigating Grief in Business School Becoming a Parent in Business School
