HDS Takeaways from a Graduating Student: Samirah Jaigirdar

by Samirah Jaigirdar, MTS ’24

Editor’s Note: In this post, soon-to-graduate MTS student and 2022-2024 Admissions Graduate Assistant Samirah Jaigirdar reflects on her last two years at HDS prior to walking across the Commencement stage.

Nearly two years after nervously sitting in the James Room for New Student Orientation, my time at HDS is almost at its end. Today (when I wrote this), I attended my last master’s degree class, and last week I submitted my CRPL capstone. These next three weeks will feature me writing my final papers, working my last shift with HDS Admissions, saying goodbye to the Pluralism Project team, and finally accepting my diploma from Dean Frederick on May 23. While I am excited about these milestones and my post-HDS plans, it feels bittersweet to leave this part of Cambridge I have called home for the past two years.

I am incredibly grateful for the personal and intellectual growth I have experienced at HDS. The interdisciplinary nature of the MTS program has uniquely prepared me to start a doctoral program in international relations in the fall. While I cannot say enough good things about the classes I took here, I am more thankful for the staff and faculty who have allowed me to question, inquire, and pursue avenues of interest, even if some of them weren’t ultimately viable for me. Having the chance to explore topics as well as delve into research methods was an incredibly helpful exercise in preparation for my post-HDS aspirations.

While people come to Divinity School with different goals in mind, I was fairly focused on preparing myself for a doctoral program from the beginning. However, there were numerous times when I doubted if a doctoral program was “right” for me, and it was during these moments that some of my HDS experiences helped me discern what was “right” for me. My participation in the CRPL program, in particular, allowed me to explore what a research career could look like even if one isn’t a professor at a university. I knew I wanted to be in research, I just didn’t know what shape of it would be suitable for me. While MDiv students come to HDS with a form of ministry in mind, I have sometimes joked that researching political violence in South Asia is my ministry. Thus, despite the existential doubt I experienced during various moments, I am glad I went through them. They ultimately provided me with clarity and confidence when I was applying to programs and helped me feel good about the choice I was making when I committed to a PhD program.

While this blog is largely about my experiences at HDS, I do have some general advice for those who will be embarking on this journey:

• Find your people! Graduate school gets stressful! I would not have made it through if it was not for the friends I made through my classes and my work in both HDS Admissions and the Pluralism Project. Sometimes just working in the library with a group of friends is enough to get you through a tough paper or reading!
• Find professors you enjoy working with. While it was great to explore different topics, I have really enjoyed finding a few professors whom I can repeatedly take classes with. I ended up taking almost all the course offerings by three specific faculty members and ended up learning the most from them. Their teaching style, pedagogy, and research areas greatly appealed to me, so I was keen to get to know them as well as I can in two years.
• Take non-HDS classes. I took one non-HDS class every semester, and it was a great way for me to step out of the HDS bubble and explore topics of interest from a non-religious studies perspective. As I was interested in applying to PhD programs in Political Science, I enrolled in courses at the Kennedy School and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences focused on game theory, democratic institutions, and the intersection of law and religion.
• Balance graduate seminars with normal classes. I highly recommend that people limit the number of graduate seminars they take to 2 per semester. Otherwise, you’ll end up like me in the Spring of 2023 when I had to write a total of 95 pages for my finals. I was in 4 classes where 2 were master’s seminars, 1 was a doctoral seminar, and the last was my language class. Please don’t do this!
• Do a Jan term course! The Jan(uary) term courses are a niche and very fun thing to explore. There were so many offerings across Harvard that I had a tough time figuring out which to take! There were policy paper writing workshops, coding bootcamps, a sustainability in the Arctic class, and many others. I took the Negotiation Workshop at Harvard Law School and thoroughly enjoyed my experience. It is not the kind of course I would like to take as a semester long endeavor but doing it jam packed in three weeks was a good way to delve into negotiation tactics in-depth.
• Go to one HDS/Harvard event every two weeks. With our schedules becoming increasingly packed as the semester ramps up with academic work, it’s easy to forget that we are on a campus with a variety of events. I encourage everyone to check the events calendar for both HDS and Harvard at large, and to select an event or two to attend every month. As someone with a keen interest in political science, I have attended numerous talks and workshops featuring political organizers, leaders, and even three prime ministers! For those interested in academia, the spring semester offers numerous academic conferences across Harvard. Just a few weeks ago, I attended the Asia Center Graduate Student Conference and was blown away by many of the talks and panels!
• Visit the Harvard Arboretum! Situated a little further away from campus, this is a fun weekend outing during early fall or the spring.
• Enjoy what Boston has to offer. I cannot recommend the museums in Boston enough. Most of them are free to us as students so I highly recommend checking out the Isabella Gardner Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts at least once during your time here. I also encourage people to sign up for Innings and Outings using your Harvard email as you will find discounted tickets to baseball games, the New England Aquarium, Broadway shows In Boston, and seasonal activities around Boston. I highly recommend the Duck Tour!