Colin Powell School
Sangida Akter
2021 Salutatorian for Colin Powell School
1. Where are you from and what is your background? Please share your story from the
period before you arrived at CCNY.
My parents are originally from Bangladesh. I was born in Los Angeles, then moved to Queens, NYC where I have spent most of my life. However, for a period of years I did live in Saudi Arabia and often visit Bangladesh. In that way, I feel like I have a foot in both hemispheres. This is probably why the influence of cultural identity and beliefs in psychological research has captured my interest so extensively.
2. What brought you to City College?
The close-knit structure of the CCNY Honors Program brought me to CCNY. I wanted to make sure that in the midst of such a beautiful but large campus community, I didn’t feel lost. The small cohort of students and caring advisors in the honors program have been instrumental to the motivation I needed to set various goals for myself during my time at CCNY. Additionally, I knew that I wanted to be a social science major and the Colin Powell School felt the most academically diverse place to be studying social science.
3. What is your passion or purpose behind pursuing what you did at City College?
At City College, I have been passionate about understanding the complex mental health needs of marginalized communities and the barriers they face in accessing affordable, culturally competent mental health care. My passion is fueled my upbringing in the Bengali-American and Muslim-American communities where I first had the chance to glimpse how painful mental health experiences of children of immigrants can be when they have to navigate stigma, invalidation, limited access to resources, and fears about having to uphold a positive image of their minority communities at the risk of suffering in silence. The experiences of my community pushed me to dedicate my career to finding solutions through research and clinical care that ease their pain. While mental health challenges come announced and unwanted, they do not have to define a person for life.
4. Briefly, how has your career unfolded? How did City College and/or the Colin Powell School help you to get where you are at in your career?
Through my studies in sociology at the Colin Powell School, I acquired the vocabulary to connect individual struggles to the societal institutions that shape collective experiences. Through my studies in psychology, I learned about how socio-political experiences intersect with the developmental to create unique stressors in the lives of individual human beings. At every step of learning, my professors challenged me to be mindful of inclusion, equity, and accessibility and find the voices that weren’t traditionally represented in the discourse.
My simple desire to be a mental health professional when I first entered college became transformed into a recognition of how complex the mental health needs of South Asian and Muslim American communities are. I now know that it is not enough to de-stigmatize mental health or to diversify clinician populations. Diverse communities deserve to learn about and embrace mental well-being through the linguistic concepts, experiences, and coping strategies already present within their cultural and religious traditions. Furthermore, individuals have a right to affordable mental health care and clinicians who understand how multiple minority identities can create risk and foster resiliency.
It is only because of the continuous stress the Colin Powell School placed on approaching academia with compassion and recognizing the dignity of the communities we hope to serve, that my professional goals were nurtured and able to evolve into more meaningful pursuits.
5. Please share a significant memory or accomplishment from your time at City College.
One experience has been volunteering as a research assistant in Dr. Melara’s Gabor Lab in the Psychology Department. It’s where I first met like-minded peers and friends who also wanted to pursue a graduate degree in psychology. In between collecting data for our research and discussing journal articles, my peers and I spent a lot of time talking about the challenges we were encountering, the personal experiences that fueled our academic goals, and the aspirations we had. Through that comradery, I learned how to be disciplined, persistent, and strategic about my academic and professional goals. It was also the first time I had the opportunity to view myself not merely as a student absorbing and reflecting on already established concepts, but rather as an independent thinker who wanted to contribute knowledge to the field in the future. The Gabor Lab challenged me to think at a higher level and hone research skills that later became essential to the undergraduate thesis I had the opportunity to complete, Muslim American College Students’ Beliefs About Mental Illness and Treatment.
6. Do you have any advice you could give to current or future students?
Don’t let the limits of a syllabus or textbook define what learning can look like. We each carry with us experiences that generate our own set of intellectual curiosities that we should feel emboldened to bring up in the classroom and in our coursework. By asking new and different questions, we add complexity and richness to our learning and allow it to be fueled by personal values and motivations. And that is when I believe we do our best work.