Name: Gauri Ganjoo
Class Year: 2019
Major: Mathematics
Hometown: Fremont, California
Why did you choose to attend Mount Holyoke College?
I went to a very large public high school and there it’s very hard to get help, advice, or attention from your teachers and faculty, so I decided that at college I wanted it to be a smaller, more supportive environment. When I was applying, I wasn’t necessarily thinking about going outside of the state, and I had never heard of Mount Holyoke before. My counselor recommended it to me because she saw what I was looking for and I looked it up, applied, and went to the admitted students weekend and that really sold me on Mount Holyoke. The admitted students weekend confirmed for me that the teachers are there, classes are small, and you don’t have to be at each other’s throats to benefit from the school.
Last Friday was your first meeting with the Her Campus Mount Holyoke team. Welcome! Why did you want to join?
I like storytelling and last semester I took a class where we wrote blogs, and it was the first time I had done that. It was little bit more informal, but I really liked that because you can get more humor across, and you can be a bit more personal. I like writing, but it’s one of those things that I have never gotten a chance to do and put my voice out as much. I saw the Her Campus ads and was like, “This is one of the reasons I came to Mount Holyoke! There’s chances everywhere.” So I took a chance and I applied.
What class were you referring to where you wrote blogs?
It was called “Breakfast in America”, it was my First-Year Seminar. It was a class that talked about coffee, sugar, bananas, and chocolate. It looked at commodities that have been traded between Latin America and the U.S, and the stories and history behind it that people don’t know much about. It’s surprisingly current and still relevant in a lot of ways today. The professor — Professor Mosby — had us do slightly less formal papers for that class. For one of our first blogs, she had us go to a cafe or a coffee shop and observe the environment and look at the coffee’s packaging to see where the coffee was coming from and blog about that.
Has math always been in your life?
Yeah, in a way. It was funny because I had always liked math, and it’s hard to say, but there was always something that kinda drew me to it. I liked the logic of it. Take science, for example; I feel like you’re learning a new thing, and another new thing, and another new thing, and they kind of connect, but for a while it’s just new material all around and it’s just so much. But with math, it feels like it builds on top of each other, and it doesn’t feel to me like I’m learning so much new separate stuff, but because it builds on each other, it makes sense. And I really like that. The higher math I get to know, I see where it’s applicable to the world, like what I am going to do with this in terms of real-life applications. I’m at the point where I can see that now, and that’s very interesting to me.
Are you involved in any other orgs or activities on campus?
I’m the treasurer of the Mount Holyoke Pie Circle, that was a thing I started this semester as well, it’s a fairly new club, I think it’s been here since spring 2015. It’s my first time being a treasurer so I got to learn how to do things like getting funding, and when the semester comes to the end I get to do the audit, so it was interesting and I’m learning a lot. The other thing is — as nerdy as this sounds — there is a Math Club, and basically I joined it earlier in the year because they bring people to lecture every week and there’s pizza. I went and that was very beneficial to me because I got to really know the faculty and department, I got a better sense of what classes I should take, and I also got to meet the other majors. And there’s pizza!
Now a fun question: do you have a favorite show? And if so, try to convince readers they should watch it!
One of my favorite shows is Doctor Who. So normally when I’m trying to show somebody Doctor Who — and I explain, “Oh, it’s about a time-traveling alien,” that’s the premise — I pick this one episode from the third series of the new show (there was classic Doctor Who and then a twenty-year hiatus and then they restarted it). So in the third series, there’s an episode called “Blink” and it features these aliens called the Weeping Angels, they’re actually a really popular meme if you’ve ever seen online, these statues of angels that say “Don’t Blink”: they’re the Weeping Angels. The episode is good because it’s not a traditional episode, but it’s scary and it’s very well-paced, and it’s most fun to watch in the dark, which is normally what I do to my friends. I find that the episode is a good gateway into Doctor Who.
Check out Gauri’s first article here.
If you would like to write for Her Campus Mount Holyoke, please email mt-holyoke@hercampus.com.