Ria Mirchandani '15

Current Roles: Product Manager

IC: Computer Science and Migration Studies

Capstone project: A syllabus module to help teach about migration in South Asia in the college classroom

GISP: Role of Public Memory in Conflict Resolution

"With great power, comes great responsibility," Ria said of the Open Curriculum. "The constant decision-making got exhausting at times and it still left me confused, but it is definitely a more informed confused.” While some might argue that the Open Curriculum could benefit from more constraints, Ria believes this is fundamentally antithetical to the mission of the Open Curriculum “I’m almost concerned that if there had been more constraints on the curriculum, that would’ve made surviving it easier, so it’s no longer completing it’s goal, right?” Ria emphasizes that the curriculum “Taught me to focus on the learning, not the grades -- which is the purest pursuit of knowledge if there ever was one. It taught me to own my education and also to accept full blame for the times it felt like it went astray. It’s impossible not to be unique at Brown because everyone’s education is different.”

Though a fan of the Open Curriculum, Ria agrees that it can be challenging to carve your own path without the help of others. “During freshman year, I didn’t know who to ask for advice. But at the same time, I asked so many people who wanted to give me advice and I couldn’t categorize everything into like, who do I go to for what.” She addressed this by turning to her peers: “I found peer advising super, super helpful at Brown because, while professors were obviously very valuable, people who are going through the experience with you -- the situations are somewhat similar. It really helps to talk with them about it and learn from those experiences.”

Like many CRC staffers, Ria considered the office “the most Brown place at Brown, where people felt comfortable asking questions about anything and learned how to make the most of their time at Brown.” Ria, famous for being the GISP coordinator who drove the GISP-mobile and served as the office's unofficial mascot, says that “being an advisor at the CRC, I felt so much prouder of the Brown Community. I struggled freshman and sophomore year with figuring out what to do and I struggled and learned from it, but why should that learning be limited to myself? [Peer advising] was another way to reconnect with your community.”

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Advice for current and future Brown students:

“If you walk out of those gates at graduation just as confused as when you entered, that’s okay. The reason you’re more confused is because you’ve learned how to ask the right questions. It’s super idealistic what I’m saying, but I do say it holds true in a lot of ways. I didn’t walk out of Brown knowing exactly what I wanted to do having found my calling, which I thought would happen, but I think I had a set of tools that will help me navigate better to finally finding what I want to do.”