Tell us your name, age, and what you're up to.

My name's Mansi, I'm 24 and currently in my 3rd year of grad school at Stanford. I'm doing a dual degree in Law and Management Science & Engineering. At this point, I'm trying to figure out what to do next after having pursued my education over the past 20 years.

How did you get to what you're doing now?

The primary reason I went to law school was that I've always been interested in "social impact," in the broadest sense of the term. I thought that my undergrad degree was helpful in shaping my views and exposing me to inequalities that exist in the world. I double-majored in Global Health and History, and double-minored in Anthropology and South Asian Studies, so it was a mix of cultural studies, social science, and a generally broad liberal arts background. I was learning for the love of leaning rather than thinking too much about my career. When it came close to graduation, I thought, what's the path I can take now to acquire skills and the recognition to do something about the large-scale problems I had learned to identify? I felt like law, which touches upon every aspect of human life, would be an appropriate stepping stone. I applied to a few schools after taking my LSAT, and luckily, things kind of just worked out.

When I got to law school, it wasn't really what I thought it would be. I hated the first year. All the big ideas that shaped my interest in law school weren't a part of the curriculum at all. Law school's rigorous, Socratic method of teaching wasn't conducive to my learning style. I thought about what I could do to make the most of it. I was at a great university with a ton of access to other resources. I thought about doing a JD-MBA to get my foot in law and business, but I ended up rejecting that idea because it would take 4 years and require a separate application process for the MBA program. I ended up going for an Engineering degree that provides fundamental business skills. I'm still graduating in 3 years, but with a more quant-heavy education. A lot of the classes I'm taking have a strong emphasis on hard math, so I find myself trying to catch up to speed with material I haven't covered since high school. Getting to do half law and half engineering classes has challenged me exercise both parts of my brain, and I've also been trying to take some creative classes to balance it out. I've taken some design classes, a sculpture class, piano... just trying to take advantage of everything available to me.

Has art and other creative fields always been a hobby?

I've been drawn to art since I was young. I studied art formally until high school, but never pursued it academically. Later on, I played around with various media, so I guess I'm an amateur artist who has spent a lot of time on art. My strength is use of color. My current roommates in law school are also into art, so we end up doing a lot of spontaneous projects. Recently, we etched linoleum blocks to make prints on paper, and perhaps T-shirts in the future.

Wow, how do you have the time for it?

Law school is an incredible amount of work; it's entirely possible to spend your entire time working. For me, there is a point where I draw boundaries between how much time I will spend on school and how much on everything else. I don't want school to be my entire life. Sometimes this means sacrificing grades, but at some point, you have to give up the idea that grades define you, and also find ways to be more efficient. There are ways to manage time well — wake up earlier and accomplish more in the morning, or make good use of dead time.

For me, there is a point where I draw boundaries between how much time I will spend on school and how much on everything else. I don't want school to be my entire life. Sometimes this means sacrificing grades, but at some point, you have to give up the idea that grades define you, and also find ways to be more efficient.

Have you thought about what you want to do with your degrees after school?

Yes... I think. That's been challenging for me and I've been thinking a lot about it recently. When you're in school (and I've been in school my whole life), your milestones are set for you — finish this year, graduate, finish your credits, etc. This is the first time in my life where there's no set path that I have to take. Well, there kind of is in that most of my class end up working at a law firm for 2-3 years, and then move on from there. In fact, law is a profession that attracts very type A, focused people who follow a set path. This is the first time that I've opted out of the path, which is why I feel like there are a lot of possibilities.

I worked in a law firm for 8 weeks in a typical Summer Associate program this past summer, and I also worked at a non-profit in India for a month. What most people end up doing is working full time at the law firm of their 2L summer. But I ended up turning down that offer because I really didn't enjoy the work environment or the work itself. So now, I'm faced with figuring out how to make the most applying what I know. I don't have a particular industry or role I want to fill, which I know sounds crazy, but I'd like to work for an organization that is doing something innovative and entrepreneurial, with people who share similar values as me or have similar big ideas I know it's a lot to ask for, especially for a first job, and I know finding the perfect job takes trial and error. But I do have some ideas of what I'm looking for, and that's where I'm at now.

Have you thought about doing something on your own?

I have, but before I do, I want to formulate a solid idea of what it is and what I'm trying to do. I'd need to narrow it down in some way before just saying like, "I'm going to change the world!" It needs to be more directed, and I need more time to figure out what that is. I think it would be useful for me to spend some time working in an established environment to see how they run and learn about what works and what doesn't work before doing something else. I would like to earn some money and have some capital of my own before I take a risk.

What are some of the "big ideas" that you're interested in? What issues do you care about?

I care a lot about international development. Growing up, I went to India once or twice a year, and now I go once a year to visit all my family there. My family in India is very wealthy, and having spent a lot of time there, it always bothered me to see the incredible amount of inequality that exists in the world. The urban upper class is certainly benefitting from economic growth in India, but the majority of the population is left behind, I've done a lot of work in India since high school. I started with small-scale volunteering — I worked for a blind school and an orphanage there over the summers. Now I'm more focused on systemic issues such as the drivers of corruption, why law enforcement is ineffective, and why is it that in big cities, you only see super rich people or sprawling slums. The middle class has been pushed out entirely. This past summer, I worked for a nonprofit that works on affordable development and housing at scale.

At Stanford, I'm working on the Afghanistan Legal Education Project, partnered with the American University of Afghanistan. We've been focusing on becoming experts on various parts of the Afghan legal system to help write textbooks that Afghan law professors can teach with. This last year, we were responsible for writing and publishing a property law textbook, and I was specifically working on agricultural and water issues. Right now, I'm working on developing a public international law book for that project.

Education is another issues that have always been of interest to me. The inequitable distribution of resources in America is hard to ignore. In high school, I tutored one-on-one as a first job. As an undergraduate, I worked with programs such as the West Philadelphia Tutoring Project and the Urban Nutrition Initiative. In law school, I taught in a juvenile hall and tried to launch a program on social emotional learning for students with a history of disciplinary violations and at risk of falling into the school-to-prison pipeline. I'm currently working with an arts education program in San Francisco that works with disadvantaged students to and channel their energies to the arts. They do a variety of cool things such erect murals in the city and partner with Spotify to run hip-hop conventions. Creative education is particularly fascinating to me. As an undergrad, I co-directed the Race Dialogue Project, which wasn't as directly education-related but focused on arts. Our goal was to raise awareness about racial inequality through big public arts projects. That was a great learning experience.

A third issue that interests me is public health — I studied Global Health as an undergrad. I was interested in nutrition in particular. I've always been interested in food and access to food, inequality of access, and how that affects the quality of life. Through the Urban Nutrition Initiative in Philly, I worked with high school students in West Philly on increasing awareness about nutrition in their neighborhoods. I also did research one summer on unequal access to nutrition in low vs. high-income neighborhoods in Philly. My interest in health comes from my family — fitness and nutrition are a big part of my upbringing. I didn't really continue pursuing interest in nutrition formally in grad school, but I've started exploring food in other ways. I've gotten really interested in cooking, and food is the core of a lot of my social activities.

Something else that's been a theme in my life is gender equality. I sometimes feel like I come from a culture that doesn't really expect women to achieve. As a result, my life goals have been very self-directed. I strive to be independent and high achieving, sort of as a statement that I can do anything that I set out to do. Going back to why I went to law school, maybe it was a way to gain respect and be a role model for other women, especially those from my culture.

Something else that's been a theme in my life is gender equality. I sometimes feel like I come from a culture that doesn't really expect women to achieve. As a result, my life goals have been very self-directed.

Tell me a little about your family and how you grew up. What were your biggest influences growing up?

I grew up in Westchester, in the suburbs of NY. It was always cool having access to NYC, but at the same time, I was only really exposed to two communities — the Indian community of my parents and their family friends (a very close-kit, homogenous, insular world of its own), and the suburbs that I grew up with, which was also very homogenous (especially socioeconomically). I felt out of place a little bit growing up, because I was interested in the broader world and seeing new perspectives, and I didn't necessarily agree with the ideologies I was raised with.

I didn't really find my place or my niche all throughout school and even in early college, until I finally got involved things that were important to me at Penn. I put energy into meeting people coming from experiences very different from my own.

How did you feel after finding your niche? A lot of what you're saying resonates with my experience as well.

Even after you find it, it's a continual effort to attain the right balance. You have to balance your cultural heritage, maintain your connections, and it kind of feels like you have one foot here and one foot there.

Did these kinds of discussions come up while working on the Race Dialogue Project? What were your takeaways?

Two takeaways from working with the Race Dialogue Project, Sangam (an Asian American discussion group), and similar organizations come to mind. 1. The commonality in people's experiences, regardless of how they grew up. For example, most minorities share certain overlaps in upbringing. 2. At the same time, each individual has a unique point of view.

Being a participant, did those discussions change your opinion or solidify what you already knew?

I think that a huge point of participating in those discussions is to attend with some sort of conviction about your own opinions, but at the same time keep an open mind. You might hear something that doesn't really affect you in the moment by gains significance at some time in the future. You might internalize new perspectives subconsciously.

How has your ethnic background unified or distanced you from your peers/environment when you were growing up?

In school, I think it distanced me from the people I went to school with. Just by virtue of coming from an immigrant family and not being that familiar with American pop culture or having a bilingual household was different. I have a memory of being in school and being made fun of for what I brought to lunch. I'd throw out my lunch or not eat sometimes because I felt embarrassed. A lot of that was because I was sensitive and had low self-esteem, so I let all of that get to me, and I took it negatively that I was different from other people. But having thought about it and been exposed to other people who have gone through similar things in college has really helped me take more ownership of my ethnic background and decide for myself what parts of that background I wanted to accept and what I wanted to reject. I was able to be more deliberate about the whole thing, and have certain parts of my ethnic identity really shape me.

Have you thought about how you want to raise your kids or how you would like to see the next generation grow up?

All my thoughts regarding the next generation relate to values. Besides strong family values, I think I'd like to encourage the next generation to be compassionate and to be unrelenting in their pursuit of their passions, (instead of "settling"). I want to encourage curiosity, a sense of adventure. Those things are more important to me than specific traditions or rituals. One can always create new traditions.

This project originated to explore the conceptions of people in their twenties on how to approach life after the structure of schooling. Now that you're in a professionally oriented grad program (law), what expectations do you have for this decade of your life?

I think about the next ten years in terms more broadly than my career – I wonder what I would like to achieve as a person as a whole. In shaping goals, I'm guided by the things I value. These are the top four that come to mind:

1. Finding a job that's socially impactful.
2. Building a lot of travel and adventure into my life.
3. Trying to maintain my social relationships and also meet new people.
4. 4. Engaging creative projects, especially art-related.

I want to think about how I can use my time well to achieve all of these simultaneously – this is how I will achieve fulfillment. Career satisfaction is one part of that.

How has consideration about finances played into this?

Firstly, I've always been really fortunate to have never had to think about money that much. I've always been interested in social justice and inequality, and there's a clear tension in being really interested in that stuff and having a lot more access to resources than most people. That's something I've become a lot more conscious of as I grow older. Self-sufficiency and independence are a bit deal to me. I realized setting constraints on my use of money makes me a better person. I want to utilize my access to resources to help others gain access as well.

Secondly, living on a budget helps me be purposeful with regards to my spending priorities. It speaks to what's actually important to me in life. I've realized that spending money on experiences, especially with people, is really important to me and usually worth it. Eating at great restaurants or traveling to new places are things I want to spend money on, while products and material goods like clothes are less important to me. I want to cut down on that stuff. Having less stuff is something I have found very liberating, because I have less to worry about and less to lose. My ideal is to have enough money to support myself for the type of experiences I alluded to, without having much more beyond that.

What is "money" to you?

I'll go with the economic definition — the most efficient means to facilitate a transaction. But it's also a dangerous thing that needs to be handled with a lot of care. It can reward effort, but as soon as there's too much of it, it can also tempt every evil quality in a human being. It can engender envy, greed, and all these things most would consider inherently bad – such as a sense of entitlement or privilege. I think I grew up around a lot of very wealthy people who have a lot of money and take that for granted, and as a result, are worse off than what they could've been in terms of values. They're less sensitive to other people's situations, and end up being very insular. An even less tangible form of money is wealth, like property that is amassed across generations within families and social circles. It's such a large part of inequality but less addressed than money. Usually when we talk about inequality, we talk about difference in income as opposed to assets.

Interesting that you said that — money buys stuff, but wealth buys power. So we have to cut this short, what's the best lesson you've learned from someone?

The best lesson was that human beings have an incredible capacity to change. My goal is to be a changing person every day — kinder, more efficient, graceful, etc. I want to be healthier, more fit. Both the mind and the body are so moldable if you're aware of how you want to change and willing to put in the effort. It's important to recognize my own capacity for change and that other people equally have an immense capacity to change. It helps me recognizes the strength in others and not judge others as much, by realizing that people are shaped by the environment in which they're in. An environment can change a person too. I like the idea of human change. ■