As students bustle with heads tucked into notebooks and shoulders squeezed under backpacks,  Sanjana Marcé (12) lounges on the cross-hatched table in front of Dobbins, coolly gazing through dark tinted sunglasses. At first, a reflection of utter calm and a tinge of senior class ennui. Seconds later, she makes a short remark to a friend, interrupting the silence with raucous laughter and tight hugs.

She describes herself as someone that has chosen happiness.

“I think definitely around my sophomore year, I was trying to figure out how to be happier as a person,” she said. “I think that we do get to choose to be happy and I think that was a big moment for me and that i can now decide that I can be happy and I can be an affectionate person and approach the school with more energy. It’s someone I’ve grown to like more, but I don’t know if that was necessarily a person or an event. I think it was a growing journey.”

At school, she pursues her passion for activism by campaigning for Meatless Mondays in Green Team and leading discussions of gender equality in Feminism Roundtable.

“It always feels good to be making a difference for something that you believe in. To see—especially with what I found with Feminism Roundtable—to see that this was a place that did not exist before and now does, and that I see the conversations that happen there and it does mean a lot to people to be able to share there,” she said. “That definitely makes me happy that that exists now and that I was somehow involved in it. It always feels good to see goals that you have come to reality, and I think in that way it makes me happy, but I don’t think that if those things hadn’t worked out that I would be unhappy. You always get to decide to find things to make you happy.”

While she serves as an officer of Green Team and as Vice President of Feminism Roundtable, she couldn’t immediately recall the name of her positions in either one.

“The titles become so insignificant because you’re all working for one goal, so your title isn’t limiting in that sense,” she said. 

Beyond her leadership roles, Sanjana’s multiracial background and diverse academic interests also contribute to her sense of individuality.

“I feel that I am hard to put into a box, because I have all these different things that intersect that make it very hard to be defined by a couple words, and so I think that has given me a lot more freedom that what I think and what I do and who I am defines me, not what other people think of me just based on a couple words of who I am,” she said. “Being multiracial, there is no real box or being neither a ‘STEM kid’ or a ‘humanities kid’—not that either of those exist necessarily—but when people label you as ‘you’re this race’ or ‘you’re this STEM kid,’ I think having the freedom to not be in any of those boxes necessarily has allowed me to create my own.”

While her mother grew up in India and her father was raised in France, Sanjana’s relatives currently reside in Thailand, Korea, Algeria and Mexico.

“I feel equally comfortable in Paris as in a village in India, and it gives you so much open-mindedness,” she said. “Having that cultural awareness has given me an open-mindedness about the world in general and all the different experiences that could define a person, and I think in that way it’s given me a much better understanding of the world and its people.”

As a child, Sanjana would travel as an unaccompanied minor to visit family in France, and she developed a love for airplanes in the process.

“Airplanes have become my favorite place,” she said. “My favorite place is up. I’ve always said that my two favorite places to be are either on airplanes or on top of a bridge. I think it’s because you get to see the rest of the world as this very small thing. You know when you land and you look out a window and there’s this very specific instant where all the houses are exactly the size of LEGO houses? When I was little, this moment used to be the most amazing thing in my life. I used to call it Miniland because I was lame, but something about being able to see the world so small and feel like you are a part of it but able to change it at the same time is very inspiring and striking.”

For Sanjana, the sensation of standing atop a bridge and watching the cars whizz past evokes a particular word: sonder.

“It’s the realization that everyone else’s life is as complicated as your own. I love that word. Being able to have that understanding of the world is so important that everyone else is living their lives and you’re living yours and who you interact with or cross with is such a special moment to cherish because it’s so random to cross paths with someone,” she said.

When Sanjana visited Berlin last summer, she found that the history and the ambiance of the city really resonated with her.

“It’s this very youthful vibe, and it’s a city that’s been completely reborn from hardship, but because—I think it’s because of not necessarily despite—but because of all of that history beneath it, it’s come back with such a fighting spirit against everything. That’s something that I really admire and I love about the city. And they have incredible vegan food,” she said.