Five years ago this month, America Calling: A Foreign Student in a Country of Possibility came into the world. I’ve been thinking about what to say for the anniversary, and the honest answer is: while this is an important milestone and so much has happened these past five years around the book, it does not feel like a celebratory tour. Instead, I want to mark it with a hard look at what’s changed for international students and immigrants since—and what hasn’t— alongside a few reflections on what writing this book did to my own life.
So first, the invitation:
America Calling, Five Years Later: International Students, the American Dream & What Comes Next 📅 Monday, September 14 | 12:00–1:00 PM ET 🔗 Register here
SouthAsia-IEN, NAFSA, and the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration are hosting a special edition of the SouthAsia-IEN Global Dialogue Series to mark the anniversary, and I’ll be joined by:
Fanta Aw, CEO and Executive Director, NAFSA
Miriam Feldblum, President & CEO, Presidents’ Alliance
Karin Fischer, Senior Writer, Chronicle of Higher Education
Sunder Ramaswamy, Distinguished Professor, Middlebury College
Uttiyo Raychaudhuri, Co-Founder, SouthAsia-IEN
Fanta, Miriam, Karin and I were part of the book launch event in 2021, hosted by the Presidents’ Alliance. Five years later, we will be back next week, joined by other colleagues, to talk about what the U.S. actually promises international students today, how their experience has shifted amid policy upheavals, geopolitical uncertainty, and real affordability concerns, and how campuses can stay genuinely global when the environment makes that harder. It’s meant to be candid and forward-looking, a conversation about what it will take for America to remain a place international students still choose.
If you are in higher ed or relate to these issues, please join and stay for the full conversation. If you aren’t particularly interested in these issues but are part of my writing community, please join for the first 20 minutes where I will be in conversation with reporter, Karin Fischer, about the book and its journey.
Register for the September 14 event →
Book Giveaway! Register for the event to be entered in a giveaway to receive a signed copy of America Calling!
How the book changed my life
When the book was about to come out in 2021, I was reluctant to publicize it at first. It was always meant to be personal—a memoir, not a research report—and I was conscious of how much of my life it revealed. My imagined readers were Indian immigrants who’d walked a similar path, fans of immigrant literature, women who like coming-of-age stories. I never imagined my own professional network would read it, and I certainly never imagined international students themselves would.
That changed a couple of months before publication, when the book launch by the Presidents’ Alliance put the books in the hands of 23 university presidents and chancellors and drew almost 250 people to the virtual event.
Suddenly, what had been my small little secret that I had been reluctant to share, began to seem like part of a larger story, and one that could perhaps resonate with my colleagues and with international students—former, current, and future ones.
In the years since, the book has reshaped my life in profound ways:
It gave me purpose. The book helped me embrace a new and evolved role as an advocate for international students, lending my voice to issues that I have cared deeply about for many years but that were always sublimated in the interest of being a neutral and objective researcher.
I had studied from my detached perch the issues that mattered, all the while knowing from my lived experience that there was a deeper, untold narrative behind the data and numbers.
I could finally be authentic, claiming my former international student and Indian American immigrant identities.
It reframed how I think about leadership. You don’t need a hierarchical role to lead. You can lead by raising bold ideas, starting necessary and overdue conversations, and inspiring others to be authentic by being so oneself. The talks, keynotes, and conversations this book has opened have all been small acts of trying to strengthen a field I care about.
It reconnected me with students. This is still the best part. I didn’t expect a memoir about one former student’s experience decades ago to resonate with today’s students and TikTok generation, but it has.
It turns out that many of the social, cultural, and academic issues that international students faced back then are just as relevant today and in fact touch a broader swathe of students, including those of immigrant origin and those who are refugees.
Over the past five years, I have woken up to many messages in my inbox sent by international and other students across the country who have read the book or heard about it and want to connect, and to be heard.
It deepened my professional relationships. Writing something this personal opened the door to far more candid conversations with colleagues about our work, about career transitions, about everything in between. It also felt as if the book was able to give voice to and surface issues that many of those who work directly with international students on campuses care about, and whom I’ve gotten to know much better this past year.
While the book and specific journey within it were mine, the broader narrative belongs to us all, albeit in different ways.
It aligned my creative and professional sides. The book allowed me to accomplish something I have attempted to do my entire life: align my creative and professional sides. If you’ve read my book then you know that my early callings were perhaps to go to art school or become a writer, but I chose to not pursue either professionally. But America Calling made the accidental more intentional: in the lead up to the book’s publication and beyond, I have been creating in one form or another: I launched a newsletter that transitioned into this Substack; I decided to go independent and launched Rajika Bhandari Advisors, my research and strategy consulting firm; and I started a podcast. And the best part is this: everything I am creating is also linked to my professional work—one feeds the other.
As I reflect on these past five years, I am filled with gratitude for the support of my colleagues, of so many students, and others whom I got to know through this journey, strangers who reached out over social media and wrote to me through my website.
If someone asks me about how to change their own life and bring it into alignment, you know what my advice will be: Write a book! There is no better process for exploring internally and externally who and what you’re meant to be and what your purpose is.
If any part of the book, or this newsletter, has stayed with you, I’d love for you to join us on September 14.
Register here →
Rajika—This is such a great explanation of some of the benefits that writing a book can have. Of course, it helps a lot if it is a good book! Congratulations—I'm so happy that authorship has opened up so many interesting doors for you. Karl Weber, Rivertowns Books