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International
EDUCATION
Transcends
GLOBAL BORDERS
BY DOUGLAS HOAGLAND
Sonali Biswas flew 30 hours from her native India only to find her- self stuck outside in Fresno’s summer heat. Her classes at Fresno State started in a few days, and she needed to get settled. But the manager of her apartment wanted a check or bank draft to pay the deposit. Biswas had neither. Only cash.
What followed would highlight two realities:
• Biswas’ determination to overcome obstacles, as she has done throughout her life.
• A commitment to student success by Jason Bush, chair of
the Fresno State Biology Department, and Biswas’ academic adviser, as well as her mentor in his research lab.
On that hot afternoon in August 2021, Biswas sat at the apartment complex with her luggage near the street. She wondered if she’d made a terrible mis- take coming to Fresno State for a master’s of science degree in Biology. “I was freaking out,” she says. The only person she knew in Fresno was Dr. Jason Bush. Earlier that day, he had picked her up at the airport (“I was touched by his kindness,” Biswas says), and so she called him. Within 10 minutes, he arrived at the apartment complex, where he wrote a personal check to cover the deposit. Biswas was overwhelmed by Bush’s concern. “I was a complete stranger to him, and he did that for me.”
Coming to the university was “like a dream come true. I couldn’t have asked for a better adviser than Dr. Bush,” Biswas says. Yet she wasn’t sure she’d ever make it to the United States after her father died from diabetic complications in 2017. “I belong to a very middle class family, and my father was the primary financial support.” Biswas stayed with him while he endured a long hospital- ization and then provided care at her home until he died. That commitment caused her to lose her high school teaching job, and as she says: “It was the most difficult time of my life.”
4 California State University, FRESNO