Navigating Academia with Ease: A Deep Dive into My Ashoka Experience as a Third-Year Economics and Finance Major

Ayush Prakash is graduating from Ashoka’s Undergraduate Programme this year. He has majored in Economics and Finance, with a minor in entrepreneurial leadership and strategy. The Ashoka community takes immense pride in his accomplishments, celebrating his hard work and commitment.

“My journey at Ashoka has been incredibly comfortable. From accessing various facilities to living in residence and navigating academics, everything has been smooth. All the faculty members I have interacted with, including teaching fellows and assistants, have been very accommodative of my needs. They ensured I stayed on track with the class, making efforts to level the playing field for me so I could keep pace with everyone in my class.

All the other teams, from mess to residence life to student affairs, have been incredibly accommodating and supportive. I never felt the need to exert much effort to achieve or resolve anything; whenever I reached out, they promptly provided solutions. So life at Ashoka has been very good, and I am grateful that I chose it for my graduate experience.

One department that has immensely supported me throughout my academic journey at Ashoka is the Office of Learning Support (OLS). They handled all my academic requirements, from communicating with professors at the beginning of each semester to convey my academic needs to converting all materials into accessible formats and coordinating for extra time that I could use during exams. They made life so easy for me in terms of academics because then I didn’t have to go and talk to each professor individually, conveying my needs. They have always been in regular touch with me to take regular feedback and ensure that I am performing equally as everyone in the class and to address any additional academic requirements. Whatever I needed in terms of academics, they were always there to provide it.

Pursuing economics and finance involved a lot of visual material, and the Office of Learning Support provided invaluable assistance by offering tactile graphs, audio descriptions of diagrams and different equations. So that really helped and was one of the main reasons that I could perform well in class and was at par with everyone else.

Reflecting on my three years at Ashoka, there are few things which will stick with me throughout my life. One of them is critical thinking and evaluating everything from different lenses. Another is the power of sharing knowledge with others who may require it and multiply its impact. Equally important is the network and connections that I have developed with faculties, different teams, people, my friends. Working with different teams has provided me with immense confidence and is also a very useful resource for me to learn and grow in the future.”