Sona Jain

SFS ’16
Hometown: Los Angeles, Calif.
Major: International Economics

How would you compare your hometown to Georgetown and where do you feel more comfortable?
This is kind of a confusing question. I usually pause when people ask where I’m from. I was born in India in Chandi which is a city there, I lived in the states for three years in California then moved to Sydney for 9 and a half years then went to high school in Los Angeles. So I don’t totally know where I belong because I think that each one of those cultures – even though I didn’t live in India I visited a lot when I was young – has impacted me a lot and I would say all three cultures are very different from Georgetown — like West Coast vs. East Coast — most people understand that dichotomy. If the West Coast is considered chiller than Sydney is the complete end of that spectrum. People are very carefree, very work hard, play hard and it’s a very different environment. The place in India and the specific society I come from in India is very conservative. The people are very religious but I think contrasting that with Georgetown is interesting because even though this is a Jesuit university, I haven’t met people here who are close-minded and I love the emphasis on interfaith. I loved my high school but there was a strict dichotomy between the white population and the 75 percent Asian population, and there was no in between for ethnic diversity and as a result there was a lot of cultural homogeneity as well. I feel like Georgetown has been a great way to break out of that bubble.

What kinds of clubs or activities are you involved in here at Georgetown?
This semester I’m primarily involved in Hilltop Consultants and the Compass Fellowship – they’re both more business oriented and I find they supplement my coursework quite nicely. In the past I’ve been involved with the Parliamentary Debate Team, the Ethics Bowl — I really like discussion and debate and intellectual debate. I think they’re really stimulating and there’s lots of people in those activities and I respect them a lot. I was also in the Georgetown Development Initiative because I’m really interested in development issues and social service and using economics as a metric for poverty and things like that.

Do you feel like there is an obligation to be busy at Georgetown?
I think there is a culture of overachieving at Georgetown. I related a lot to that video that came out last semester that talked about the culture of stress but I think this is the first semester that I have been able to escape that culture and feel secure in my own accomplishments and what I want to pursue, and even though I love business and I genuinely love the work I’m doing in Hilltop Consultants, I don’t think my life goal is going into corporate work, and that’s just because my fulfillment in life comes from service and I want to go back to India and contribute to the development there and consulting doesn’t seem like the most direct path to do that – though it may be one path to do it. I think that I’ve been blessed to be surrounded by people who are very motivated, very hard working, brilliant and a lot of them are interested in the corporate world or startups or things like that and its easy when people are looking into investment banking or consulting to follow a straight path and I feel like with my extracurriculars – and obviously I don’t know what the future holds – but my extracurriculars and my profile and my resume show that I could easily go down that path and I would have to work very hard but I’ve set myself up for it pretty decently but over break I took a step back and had to ask myself why I’m doing what I’m doing, what are my life goals and are they similar to everyone else and if they’re not I have to adjust my expectations for what I want to pursue. And if that means taking an unpaid internship at a think tank over the summer, that’s fine. Or if it means joining a consulting firm and learning all the economics tools to apply to development, that’s fine as well! But I think that realizing that my life goals are different from the people around me because I happen to have a lot of friends who are interested in business has been good for me customizing my own path and not feeling that external pressure and realizing that when I spend less time worrying and stressing about being involved in other things, I have more time to develop relationships with people and that’s what keeps me mentally sane in school. That’s where I find fulfillment from that what keeps me happy and that’s what keeps me motivated so when I do work, I can work to the best of my capabilities. Different people take different amounts of time to get to that stage – it took me three semesters but I think now that I’ve got it its something I can keep in life.

Is there anything I didn’t ask about that you’d like to talk about?
I think my most interesting experience or the thing I least expected to happen when I came to Georgetown, and I think that my answer would be this past weekend there was a drag show — the Genderfunk show — and I went because a good friend of mine, Mary Baily, was in it and she was awesome. I went to see her, and I’m not the type of person who ventures that much outside of my comfort zone unless I have a legitimate reason, but I had an amazing time and I got exposure to a community that I never interact with and a type of event that I never normally attend, and it was incredible to me. I respect these people so much for being so OK with who they are, and especially everyone talks about this idea with shame associated with sex can be a negative force in terms of cultural and societal norms and people hypothesize that. When I went to this show, I really got the feeling of openness, not just in terms of sexuality, but in terms of if you want to do something sexual then there’s nothing wrong with that and if you don’t want to then that’s perfectly fine as well. nobody’s going to coerce you because it’s all consent based. No judgment, no stigmatization. That was the first time I had really been exposed to that because I do come from a pretty conservative society in India, and even though I lived in California, my part of California is pretty conservative compared to the rest of it, so even though that was a culture I can’t personally relate to it was incredible to see it played out. It’s even more incredible that that happened like a school like Georgetown which is a Jesuit university.

Interviewed by Nicole Jarvis