The Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Award is a prestigious program that fosters cultural exchange and promotes mutual understanding between the United States and India. This fellowship allows American professionals, scholars, and artists to conduct research, teach, or collaborate on projects in India. Through these experiences, fellows gain invaluable insights into India’s rich cultural tapestry and contribute their expertise to addressing local and global challenges.
Akshali Gandhi, a transportation planner from Seattle, Washington, is one of this year’s distinguished Fulbright-Nehru Scholars. With a rich background in public transit and urban planning, Akshali brings a wealth of knowledge and a passion for improving urban mobility. Her recent work in India as part of the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship is a testament to her commitment to making cities more livable and accessible. Read on to discover her inspiring journey and the impact of her work.
Can you share your background and why you pursued community and regional planning?
I grew up as a first generation American and would visit my relatives in India every few years. Those family trips sparked my interest in the built environment, particularly urban mobility and transportation. While I originally started college wanting to be a graphic designer and journalist, I quickly learned that I gravitated more toward social impact fields. In my freshman year, I attended a College of Design Open House and discovered the Community & Regional Planning program to be a great mix of design, analysis, writing, research, policy, advocacy, and economics. I’ve always been someone who had multiple interests and was glad that I found a field that tied together all of them!
How was your time working as a transportation planner at your various jobs?
After I graduated, I went on to work as a transportation planner in Pittsburgh, Washington, D.C., and Seattle. My career thus far has spanned multiple states and sectors, including municipal government, consulting, and county government. Prior to Fulbright, my most recent role was being a project manager in public transit.
For these positions, the driving force was primarily my passion for improving urban mobility and a desire to keep learning, growing, and experiencing new places! They say that your twenties are the best time to try out new things, and that philosophy has stuck with me, especially early on in my career.
What led you to apply for the Fulbright Nehru Award? What was it like applying as a professional, At-Large candidate?
I first heard the name “Fulbright Award” in college, but I never thought that I would be a competitive candidate for something like that. Then, after grad school, I started working up the confidence to apply to such fellowships, including Fulbright and was named an Alternate. I continued to build my career and adult life, applying two more times to Fulbright. After seven years of working, I realized there were limitations to only having local, domestic experience. I wanted to broaden my horizon to learn what Global South countries were doing in urban planning, as infrastructure projects can often happen a lot faster abroad than they occur in the U.S. I attended transportation themed conferences and webinars, learning about pandemic response projects focused on biking and walking across Latin America and South Asia.
As I thought about reapplying a third time, I decided to switch countries to one where I had more personal background, choosing to apply as an At-Large candidate to India. The hardest part of applying as an At-Large applicant was gathering letters of recommendation, since the Student Program application is more geared towards current students and more recent graduates. I tried to strengthen my application by talking about my professional experience and why I felt this would be a good point in my career to go abroad.
How was your time in India? Are there any highlights of the program you’d like to share?
It was an adventure! Although I was born in India and had been with my family many times, it was very different living there on my own and navigating the city independently. For the first four months, I was enrolled in a language learning program funded through a Critical Language Enhancement Award (CLEA). I’d go to class in the morning, eat lunch on campus, and go into a local NGO office in the afternoon. I shadowed staff at the Pune office of the Institute of Transportation Development and Policy India (ITDP India), assisting them with a biking and walking assessment project. Attending the report launch and riding the city’s new bicycle network was a huge highlight of my grant. I also volunteered with other organizations on some school zone work, which tied together my interests in street design and road safety for children.
On a personal front, I loved having the opportunity to attend cultural festivals, celebrate holidays, and travel the country with my fellow Fulbrighters. I definitely came away with many memories to cherish.
Now, having recently finished it, what was your biggest takeaway? What do you hope to do next?
Honestly, sometimes I feel like I’m still there! It’s hard to believe it’s over; it went by so fast. I think my biggest takeaway was gaining the confidence to make a big life decision for myself at a later stage in life, and also having the patience to apply again and again. Moving abroad while married and having a career was a huge change, but it is one I know now that I can handle. I’ll remember the friends I made and the excitement of discovering another city for myself.
I’m back home in the Pacific Northwest now. I hope to pivot my career into doing road safety and Vision Zero work, helping make streets safer for people walking and bicycling. Right now, that will be locally, but eventually, I’d love to do more global urban planning and road safety work.
And finally, can you share any tips for prospective students and professionals interested in Urban Planning and Fulbright?
Urban planning is a field that naturally lends itself very well to the mission of Fulbright – to foster mutual understanding and cultural exchange between nations. Many of my colleagues at my former job talked about international experiences they had early on in their lives and how instrumental those were to pursuing a career in planning. This was very inspirational for me to want to pursue a Fulbright. Below are some tips for planners wanting to do Fulbright (or similar fellowships):
Research Topic:
- Think about what naturally excites you and what you get curious about. What do you wonder about other places when you visit? Hone in on that and try to find the thread connecting that to your career path and personal life.
- Consider what made you originally want to go into planning as a career. How would an international experience add to that?
- Tailor your project proposal and research question to be as narrow as possible. If you have a broad research question, maybe narrow down the geographic context to a neighborhood scale. If you have a very specific research question, perhaps you could do a comparative study.
Country Selection:
- Be strategic about your country choice when applying. Not only should there be a compelling reason for why your project should be there, but also why YOU as a person should be there. As a working professional, I struggled a bit more with developing my personal statement. It took a few rounds of applying for me to figure out that India was the best fit country for what I was seeking.
- If at all possible, see if you can visit the country before you apply. Since I had a shorter grant period, I wish I could have spent less time settling in and more time hitting the ground running. Even though I had been to India before, it was quite different being there for work and cultural exchange verses just to see family. I didn’t anticipate the ramp up time needed just to understand the local planning scene where I was based.
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Akshali Gandhi is a transportation planner based in Seattle, Washington. Her background is in public transit, where she spent the last 3+ years working on bus stop infrastructure and parking policy for King County Metro. Prior to Metro, she worked as a transportation planner for the City of Pittsburgh, PA, and in the private sector as a consultant. Akshali graduated from Iowa State University in 2012 with a double major in Community & Regional Planning and International Studies and completed her Master’s in City & Regional Planning from Cornell University in 2015. She enjoys bicycling, traveling, attending film festivals, and learning languages. Akshali recently completed a 2023-24 Fulbright-Nehru Student Research grant to India.
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