STUDENT FEATURE: Radhika Dhanak
College often emits the energy of a coffee shop on a Friday morning: the overwhelming presence of chaos, the necessity of caffeine, and the scarcity of places to fit in. In the midst of this hectic, congested, and high-strung environment sits the unperturbed and poised Radhika Dhanak, senior in the College of Arts and Sciences and current President of the Mind and Brain Society. She sips her small latte as she admires the silent presence of the trees outside the window and ignores the imposing energy that surrounds her. Radhika’s mind, however, is not as tranquil as her disposition, “sometimes I look at the trees and feel in awe, these things just grow,” she said. “I’m so insignificant, it really takes the pressure off.” She radiates the same serene, but calculating, energy from the comfort of the coffee shop as she does while delegating as MBS’s fearless leader.
Radhika’s childhood was just as dynamic and ever-changing as her mind. She lived a comfortable life of consistency in Dubai where her future could be seen in the shadow of her older brother and sister. This changed at the age of fifteen when she moved to Ahmedabad, India. “[Moving] was just this disruption, you know?” Radhika said. “It was like uprooting everything when you had just laid down the roots…It was letting go of everything that was familiar.”
In hindsight, she recalls feeling enlightened. “I wouldn’t trade [my experience] for anything else, I wouldn’t have done the things I did afterwards [if it hadn’t happened], I wouldn’t have learned to live and think the way I do now. Moving was necessary.”
Radhika attended two different academic institutions while she lived in India, and the two offered very different experiences.
“My first school wasn’t very pleasant,” she said. “By the second time I moved I really shut myself out and didn’t take full advantage of the opportunity that was in front of me. Now, I know to be more receptive to things and not just live in my head.”
Her second institution focused heavily on experiential learning, which taught her about passion, leadership, and empathy. Her director held the theory that schools are for students.
“When it comes to rules, we decide,” Radhika said. “You do the work that matters to you and you give back to society.” She carried this wisdom across the Atlantic to Boston University, where she now uses it to fulfill her three academic disciplines — neuroscience, philosophy, and visual arts — and to give back to the neuroscience community by serving as president of one of the most prominent academic organizations on campus.
As for why she decided to live a fifteen hour flight away from home, she offers the following recollection.
“I was planning to study in the UK, which is where my sister studied at the time, but I would’ve depended on her for everything and I really didn’t want that,” she said. “I wanted to learn on my own, so I applied to BU and forced myself again to learn from change.”
The biggest challenge presented itself in the form of her first year, and once she conquered it, she found one lesson to be very true.
“Every single semester presents a new challenge, you always come out of it thinking that you’ve figured it all out, and then the next one starts and you realize you really haven’t figured it out at all, it’s difficult.”
Her second year was comprised of constant questioning.
“I had many existential crises… I’d look outside and see people in cars and see people in buildings and I thought, why? What are we doing? Why are we doing this? What does this mean?”
These questions inspired her to take a class on existentialism and to declare a second major in the discipline that would give her much needed perspective.
“I started thinking: what do my actions mean? How do I make them purposeful? Am I supposed to be selfish and invested in my head?” she said. “It’s my responsibility to think better than that, to try to change something, to go where there is an imbalance of access and resources.”
Her junior year became a result of her enlightenment: she became MBS secretary, an LA, a research assistant, and a peer mentor, declared a minor in visual arts, and took five classes each semester.
Though Radhika currently works in the Reinhart Lab at Boston University — a lab that seeks to understand the nature of visual perception and cognition in the healthy adult brain and how it is affected by aging and neuropsychiatric illnesses — her primary goals in life are not necessarily career oriented.
“I think my primary goal is to figure out what life means to me and understand how I can live it well,” she said. “In everything that I do, I focus on figuring out what I needed to learn from that situation and try to expand my understanding of life, people, and myself. If you’re looking to learn, you can learn from anything, so I hold on to neuroscience, I hold on to philosophy, I hold on to visual arts, then I add things outside of them to take full advantage of this time in my life, this place and its resources.”
Her advice to her fellow undergrads is to aim to understand what their work ethic is.
“Once you understand how you like to function, it’s easier to focus on what you can and want to achieve.
“Then learn the skills necessary to succeed in your field: get lab experience, take upper level classes, force yourself to reflect, When you’re in a field like neuroscience you forget your passions because you might be so focused on doing the most competitive thing within the field; no, do what makes sense to you because then it isn’t a competition.”
In that moment, Radhika made it evident that the most placid people have some of the loudest, most active minds.
Writer: Stephanie Gonzalez
Editors: Emme Enojado, Enzo Plaitano, and Yasmine Sami
