Volleyball. Journalism. DECA. BEcon.

In four years of high school, Ria Gandhi (12) has created quite a splash, leaving her mark on many aspects of the Harker community. But some of her high school experiences were cut short by an injury she had at the end of her sophomore year.

“At the end of my varsity [volleyball] season in my sophomore year, I tore the cartilage in my right wrist, and because that hand was my dominant hand, it impeded a lot of things that I could do. Anything like writing to trying to turn a doorknob took a lot of pain and a lot of effort,” Ria said. “So I decided I’d have to make some sacrifices in life.”

Her injury not only led her to leave her positions on the varsity girls’ volleyball team and as Harker Aquila’s features editor in her junior year but also impeded her everyday life. However, Ria still found small ways to adapt to her new situation.

“I actually taught myself to write with my left hand since I couldn’t write with my right hand. I would sit in my calculus class in my sophomore year and write ‘The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog’ over and over again so I’d get through every letter of the alphabet,” she said. “It was pretty cool to teach myself to do something like that and have it work for a little time.

The same resilience Ria showed in adapting to the little troubles in her life extended to her passions and interests in school: without journalism and volleyball, she found herself getting more involved in business, putting more time into DECA and picking up leadership roles in BEcon.

“I hated to have to drop volleyball and journalism, but [my wrist injury] also pushed me to explore a lot of other things in life,” she said. “I would never have gotten as deep into business through everything that I did if I had still been playing volleyball or in journalism just because of time.”

Other than her roles in BEcon and DECA, Ria’s summer experiences in her junior and senior year played a large role in helping her dive deeper into business, specifically her passion for nonprofit organizations. In the summer before her junior year, she participated in MIT Launch, a summer program that brings high school students together to create their own companies, where she expanded a branch of a fellow student’s non-profit to the Bay Area to help seniors learn about technology. In the summer before her senior year, Ria worked for an education nonprofit to educate local high schoolers and middle schoolers and improve the resources they had access to.

“I’d also been volunteering a lot before that in senior centers and veteran’s hospitals and everything but that opened up my segway into what the nonprofit world could do,” Ria said. “That’s where I realized that’s what I want to do on the side in the future.”

While Ria has created multiple opportunities for herself throughout high school, she believes in doing the same for others by giving back to those who are less fortunate in the community around her in any way she can.
“Whether I’m doing non-profit work or doing anything in business, the societal impact is what drives me. Whatever education I’m receiving right now or whatever extracurriculars I participate in or anything that I do, I like to know that my actions have an impact on the greater good. That’s why I strive to do whatever I do,” she said. “In anything, I try to introduce a community aspect to it because I think everybody should benefit.”