Interview with Aditi Sriram from Shiv Nadar School of Law

The History of India Podcast

Professor Aditi Sriram discusses her academic transition from a quantitative background at Columbia University to a career in creative writi

Key takeaways

• Aditi Sriram transitioned from studying Applied Math and Economics at Columbia to pursuing a Master's in Creative Writing.
• She worked in the consulting industry for five years before returning to academia for writing.

Main topics

• Academic transitions
• Overcoming writer's block

Notable quotes

I think my confidence came from where I could be helpful.

Conclusion

The episode serves as an inspiring guide for students and aspiring wri

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:02) Hello everybody, welcome to another episode by the podcast club of Shibnada School of Law. On today's episode, we have Professor Aditi Shriram. Speaker 2 (0:14) Hello, ma'am. Hello. There's one interesting question that I wanted to ask you at first. When I started researching about this podcast about you, I discovered that you completed your Bachelor of Arts degree from Columbia University with concentrations in Applied Math and Economics. It's true. And then you shifted your focus to literature in your master's. What brought up the change? What Speaker 1 (0:39) happened during Speaker 2 (0:41) your master's? Speaker 1 (0:42) I think some critical thinking happened after the bachelor's. So I went into my undergraduate degree thinking I will continue to do what I do at school. And I was pretty good at maths in school. I enjoyed numbers. I enjoyed quantitative work. I really loved writing and reading. But somehow I felt that is better relegated to a hobby as opposed to something you study in college. Columbia is a big university. They have terrific programs and departments. It's expensive. I should get a good job after I finish my undergrad degree. A job with a degree in economics versus a job if I'm holding a degree in literature. I just wasn't sure how the chips would fall. So I thought maybe a safer bet. And my parents, of course, were fully behind this idea that you get a solid STEM kind of degree and go from there. But the math gets very difficult very quickly once you join college. You go far beyond calculus, which I was quite good at, into realms of algebra and geometry and equations that I took much longer to figure out. And so it was an uphill undergraduate experience where what I truly enjoyed were the classes that were outside of the quantitative work. So I took classes in ethnomusicology and in French literature and some reading-heavy courses. Speaker 1 (1:59) bhakti, you know, Hinduism with an excellent professor from a nearby college. I mean, the whole thing was, that whole side was very exploratory while I then had to come back to the maths because that was the main degree. So I managed, I got through it. I got a job in consulting. I worked for five years. But I was very clear in my mind after that that I could not pursue maths or economics as degrees beyond my undergrad. I didn't have the ability or the interest. Or the strength to say, you know, I will muscle my way through learning these concepts properly and then building on that to create some new levels of understanding. I said, if I study again, it's books, it's writing, it's the stuff that I wish I had done more of when I was in college. So then sort of that eliminates things from the list, right? So I wasn't interested in MBA or in higher studies in maths or econ. And it wasn't like the next option was then creative writing. But in living in New York, where I was and was working, I was just exploring the city. So I would finish work and I'd go to book readings and I'd go to, I mean, university spaces, you can kind of walk in and out of them. There'd be book launches happening at every second bookstore, authors hanging around here and there. So I just, in kind of interacting with these groups of people or going to these kinds of events, I was like, oh, you could study this? You can go to school to just study writing and it's not a literature degree where you have to have maybe done some BA courses in literature so that you can now do a master's in literature. This is a master's in creative writing. You can come at it with any background. And I thought that sounds interesting. So let me just see if I apply. I mean, you have to have work that you've written to apply with. I didn't have anything written down. So I spent a couple of years just writing and reading and interacting with faculty from various universities in New York. And then ended up studying at one of them. But that was the kind of moving away from stuff I was okay at to stuff that I was better at because I was also able to spend the time required to be good at it. Speaker 2 (4:03) Now, this just reminds me of how much I personally hate math and economics. And this is not propaganda that is... pushed on you by law students. Law students do like math. It's just not me. I don't like math. And I think Aditi ma'am also. Speaker 1 (4:20) It's not that I don't like math, but I couldn't study partial differential equations beyond understanding how they worked at a very basic level. You put me into kind of algebra, beyond linear algebra. I was just lost in the room. And then my classmates are all studying it. They're able to handle the problem sets. They're able to move ahead. And I was slowing them down. you know, to then think about research in these fields. I just knew I wasn't going to be original in any way, not even original, Speaker 2 (4:46) but Speaker 1 (4:46) be able to pull my weight. So, but then any classes we had that required essays, I was helping all of them. So I think I also just felt like my confidence came from where I could be helpful. And it was not in the realm of maths. I admire mathematics. And I agree, no propaganda on the podcast. But there is something to be said for feeling comfortable with numbers, right? And data. And if you do that somewhere along the way in your undergrad degree, I think that's a good thing. That's propaganda. Speaker 2 (5:14) Alright, so talking about the shift from school to college, I just wanted to know, what are some thumb rules that you wish every school taught their students that would help them avoid the prominent errors that we make in our writing courses? So I think what I've felt for a long Speaker 1 (5:35) time is that students don't, and this is not per se the school's fault, I think students... Speaker 1 (5:44) To feel like you own the work that you're writing and that it matters beyond the fact that it's due in class. Like, we have to submit this thing. Is Speaker 2 (5:51) it Speaker 1 (5:51) Saturday noon or Saturday midnight? Is it Friday 4 o'clock or is it Friday 7 o'clock? When do you have a bit more time to just get it done and send it off so it's no longer your headache, now it's my headache? Speaker 2 (6:01) Or Speaker 1 (6:01) like Mukundan sir's headache or Nupur ma'am's headache to like sit and grade, right? Speaker 1 (6:06) To me, that makes the work transactional. You're writing it because I asked you to, right? We read something and I've said, write an essay. Oh, do we have to? Yes. Okay, fine. How long is it? Okay, it's this long. We kind of get through the motions of what should it look like. Speaker 2 (6:20) Now Speaker 1 (6:20) you're like, okay, I'll finish it. I'll send it off. But then I'm kind of done with it, right? I'm tired of it or I don't know what else to say about it or do with it. And you surrender it to the teacher. And then he comes back to you with a grade. And if you're happy with the grade, you don't give it a second thought. If you're unhappy with the grade, then you go fighting about the grade, right? Speaker 2 (6:38) But Speaker 1 (6:39) this idea that what you wrote is something that represents you. And the more pride or confidence or care you put into that object, the better it's going to be received by me or the teacher. But also like this is... a part of you that you've shared with the rest of us to read and think about. Maybe it's about something you have no interest in. You know, write an essay about Alexeyevich, some random Russian from 50 years ago or from something that you did not experience firsthand. So it seems very distant. Write an essay comparing three books. I don't know, write some, you know, write about Shakespeare. And none of this matters in your daily life. So it just, you know, you don't sort of have that kind of emotional investment in the piece. I feel school and college, like