cHASING DREAMS

When 27-year old Jyotshana Gautam decided she wanted to pursue a PhD in Microbiology, she scoured the web for information, and contacted close to five hundred professors via email. Based on the responses she received, she applied to four universities. She eventually gained admittance to three of the four, and chose to accept the first offer she received, extended to her by Dr. Zhaohui Xu of Bowling Green State University in Ohio.

Jyotshana is from Nepal, a country of 29 million people roughly the size of Florida, sandwiched between India and China. Its capital, Kathmandu, was the final stop for the "hippie trail" of the 1960s and 70s, Every description of Nepal will mention its relative poverty, but it is also a country rich in biodiversity and home to the mighty Himalayas. Until 1951, the king was a figurehead, and the Rana family of hereditary prime ministers governed the country with an iron fist, keeping its borders closed to all but a select few. When they were overthrown and King Tribhuvan restored to power, the literacy rate in Nepal hovered around 5%. Just 10,000 students were enrolled in the country’s 300 schools and two universities. (CBS 2003).

Today, despite several long periods of political instability (a Maoist insurgency that led to ten years of civil war, and also a tragic royal massacre), and challenges to education access posed by gender bias, caste discrimination, and poverty, the literacy rate (which varies widely between the different ethnic groups as well as between urban areas and villages) for Nepal is close to 65% (CIA 2017). Almost every street in Kathmandu seems to house one school or another. Getting an education in villages can still be difficult, but those living in urban areas such as Kathmandu, Pokhara, and Biratnagar have embraced formal schooling as a vehicle to greater prosperity, and the competition for scholarships and seats in coveted universities is intense.

Increasingly, these students are looking to the United States to further their educational aspirations. During the 2016/17 school year, there were over 11,500 Nepali students enrolled in colleges and universities in the United States, a 20% increase over the previous year. The year before, their numbers had grown by over 18%., making Nepalis one of the fastest growing student communities in the United States (IIE 2017).

Jyotshana’s story that follows is unique to her, but it does lead to several questions that apply to the Nepali student population as a whole: 1) How does a country with an annual per capita purchasing power equivalent to $2,520 (ranked 187 out of 216 nations globally), compared to the United States' $58,700 (World Bank 2016), manage to send as many students as it has/does to the United States to study? 2) Given the country’s very different languages, cultural traditions, and educational system, how do they manage to compete with students born and raised in the U.S. and other more affluent countries? Furthermore, how do they cope? 3) Why is the United States such an appealing destination for them? And finally, 4) Is this surge a result of U.S. institutions' active recruitment and marketing of the "American Dream" to impressionable Nepali youth?  

Born in 1986 in Biratnagar, an industrial city in southeastern Nepal close to the border with India, Jyotshana is one of three children. Her mother had a career as a singer on Nepali television, and her father was a journalist. When her father's job required that the family move to Kathmandu, Jyotshana remained with with her mother’s family in Biratnagar to finish high school.

After completing 10th grade, Jyotshana sat for the SLC (School Leaving Certificate) exams and received excellent marks, leading her father to tell her: “you must study biology,” and so she did. At the age of 16, she was happy to move to Kathmandu to live with her parents once again. She started her “+2” studies in biological sciences, after which she planned to apply to medical school. But the competition for admission to the government medical schools was fierce, and scholarships limited. Again her father advised her to continue on with her studies while leaving the door open to apply to medical school in the future. A new program in microbiology in one of the Kathmandu colleges caught her interest, so she went on to pursue her Bachelor's degree, and again applied to medical school, but with no success. Still motivated to continue studying microbiology, she earned a Master's degree in medical microbiology and followed what she calls “the herd of microbiologists” trying to secure employment in government jobs, research labs, and in teaching in Nepal.

She landed a job as a lab coordinator, but the work was too elementary to hold her interest. Jyotshana then decided to do what so many other Nepali graduate students in microbiology, physics and chemistry were doing – sit for the GRE (Graduate Records Examinations) and TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language). She got good scores, and so began exploring PhD programs in the United States.

A major reason PhD programs in the United States are attractive to Jyotshana and other Nepali students who are in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) fields is that between teaching assistantships and the research funding already secured by professors, international students can – at least financially – be on equal footing with students born and raised in the U.S.

Once she decided to accept Dr. Xu’s offer, Bowling Green State University sent her an I-20 form generated by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that spelled out the cost of her program and the support being offered. She then filled out a form requesting a Visa interview from the American Embassy in Kathmandu. Because all the paperwork was in order, there were no obstacles to getting her F1 academic visa. Soon afterwards, the university connected her with an international student from India who was looking for a roommate. She was now ready move halfway around the world to a country she had never visited, to work for a professor she had never met, in a city she had never heard of before.

Prior to Jyotshana’s arrival in Bowling Green in August 2014, she spent an enjoyable week traveling with a friend, first in Texas, and then in Alabama. Neither place was what she expected “America” to be, so she was cautious about making  any assumptions about Bowling Green. Bowling Green is a small college town in northwest Ohio. Its population of around 30,000 – over half of whom are university students – is 88% white (U.S. Census 2016). The town (named after Bowling Green, Kentucky), is appropriately flat, just like a green for bowling. Oil was discovered in area in the 1880’s, creating a surge in the city’s population, and some wealth. Beyond the city boundaries is farmland. There is no public transportation., and it gets really cold in winter.

Over the years, the number of Nepali students at Bowling Green State University (BGSU) has grown substantially, mirroring the national trend. There are now over 25 Nepali graduate students enrolled. Thirty years ago there was just one. Along with the two Nepali families in the city, they form a lively community and enjoy getting together socially and organizing events around the both the Nepali holidays, as well as the American ones.

With no time to familiarize herself with her new surroundings, Jyotshana threw herself into her work. In addition to her coursework and her lab job assisting Dr. Xu, she was also a teaching assistant. She knew it would be hard, and it was. What she hadn’t realized was how very lonely it would be so away from family and friends in Nepal. After the first semester, however, she made friends, particularly among the other international students. She got into the social groove of BGSU, and began to enjoy herself.

Being so far away from her close friends in Kathmandu gave Jyotshana a greater clarity regarding her future, and with whom she might want to spend it. She had been communicating with one particular friend, Sudhan Pachhain, who she had met in Kathmandu when they were both pursuing their graduate degrees in microbiology. Sudhan is from Bhairawa, which lies due east of Kathmandu near Lumbini, the birthplace of Buddha.

The two of them had spoken of marriage, and Jyotshana made plans to return to Nepal for a visit after the Spring semester ended in 2015. She arrived in Kathmandu at the end of May, just a month after the magnitude 7.8 earthquake had struck, leveling entire villages, damaging historic structures and leaving a death toll of 9,000. Their families had survived intact, and with their support, Jyotshana and Sudhan were married in a quiet civil ceremony at the Office of the Chief District Officer. Despite the devastation of the earthquake all around them, they managed to carve out time and space for themselves as newlyweds before Jyotshana returned to the U.S.

Sudhan joined Jyotshana in Bowling Green after his dependent visa was approved. Once in Bowling Green, bored with inactivity, he decided to take the GRE and TOEFL. Through Jyotshana he met one of the other professors in the Biotech and Molecular Biology Department, and started working in her lab. She encouraged him to apply to graduate school. He was accepted at BGSU and has just completed the first semester of his program.

For now, Jyotshana and Sudhan seem content – their work is stimulating and they feel challenged. Last year the Nepali students organized an official Association, and Jyotshana was elected vice president. Looking to the future, both of them would like to get work experience in the United States. Sudhan would prefer to work in a lab. Jyotshana thinks she would enjoy teaching. Eventually, however, she feels their paths will most likely take them back to Nepal, which she still considers “home."

“My professor calls me Josina. I don’t remember any of my American classmates calling me by name. They just talked to me when I looked to them. ( In the classes I TA ) I give my students my short name Jasu. Jasu is my pet name . . .”

“When I landed . . . I was like, I want to see America, (what) is it like? I wanted to see from the window. And I was like, Is this America? This looks like a big highway! It was just land all around, no tall buildings – is it America?”

“Here you don’t have any transportation, you just walk around the place. And I was like, I was not expecting this. And I had the pressure of studying immediately with the start of the semester. It was really bad.”

“People here don’t smile and laugh that often. Like we smile and we laugh and we talk so much. They are like neutral, in their neutral face all the time. When you go talk to them, they don’t smile at you.”

“In Nepal, I would say in microbiology, we covered more theory. But we didn't do many experiments. We didn't have the equipment. We just looked at a picture of the equipment in our book, and here you get to see it for real and then you realize, oh it’s very small compared with what I have imagined . . . here you get to know the equipment, you work with it, you decide what you want to do. It’s more of an experimental approach . . ."

REFERENCES:

Government of Nepal, Central Bureau of Statistics Report. “Nepal in Figures.” 2003.

CIA World Fact Book. Nepal. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/print_np.html

Institute of International Education. (November 13, 2017). “International Student Enrollment Trends. Open Doors Report.  http://www.iie.org/opendoors

U.S. Census Bureau, 2012 – 2016 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates

World Bank, Gross national income per capita 2016, Atlas method and PPP. http://databank.worldbank.org/data/download/GNIPC.pdf

INTERVIEW:

Text is based on an interview with Jyotshana Gautam and Sudhan Pachhain conducted on December 29, 2017, at the Bowling Green State University Student Union. 

© 2018 Deepika Shrestha Ross