Alumni Spotlight: Shanta (Class of 2019)
From Nepal to RBC: Shanta’s Journey of Quiet Determination
Shanta’s UWC journey began in Nepal when she heard about a faraway boarding school teaching entirely in English, a language she barely spoke. Terrified but determined, she spent months stubbornly practicing, refusing to let fear stop her from applying. Her acceptance brought a daunting journey. In Doha, she navigated the vast airport by repeatedly asking information desks to help read her boarding pass. Arriving in Frankfurt jet-lagged and unable to understand German, she simply followed other passengers until she found the exit and someone from RBC. When she finally reached the bottom of the college hill, wide-eyed and exhausted, a crowd of second-year students was waiting to carry her bags.
What followed was two years that taught her far more than she had expected. Orientation gave way to lessons within a week, and the structure of it, a full timetable planned down to the hour, was itself something new for her to learn to manage. Shanta still remembers standing in a circle during that first orientation, opening her mouth to say her own name and finding nothing there. Learning English properly, she says, came down to people: her personal tutor Julia and all her patient and kind teachers. Alongside learning the language came a string of skills she still uses today. She took economics as her subject, guided by Leo, a foundation that would carry her all the way through university and into her career. She fondly remembers that she organised a cricket CAS with friends, something that would later give her an easy way to bond with fellow alumni in the US. At RBC, she also learned to ride a bicycle for the first time in her life, and how to fix one, a small, practical skill that stayed with her long after she left. Just as demanding as the language was adjusting to the food and to the sheer range of personalities and cultures around her, something she had never had to navigate before and had to learn largely by paying close attention. In between the hard work, she found her own small joys: hiking through Switzerland during project week, cafes and shows, an unexpected fondness for house cleaning days, and long unhurried afternoons in the school garden which quickly became her favourite place on campus. Alongside all of this stood her host family, Ulrike and Joachim Kurz from Buchenbach, who became something like a second family during her time at RBC. They bought her a dress for her first Christmas away from home, drove her around through the Black Forest and over the border into France, introduced her to their friends, and gave her extra pocket money and funds for a trip to Austria with friends.
After graduating from RBC in 2019, Shanta continued her studies at Wartburg College in Iowa and later at Lake Forest College in Illinois, where she focused on economics. University itself felt more manageable than she had expected, not because it was easy, but because RBC had already taught her how to manage an impossible schedule, how to write under pressure, and how to keep going in an unfamiliar language and culture. That same drive showed up beyond the classroom too: in 2021, Shanta was awarded a $10,000 Davis Projects for Peace grant, which she used to help build school bathrooms in earthquake-devastated areas of Sindhupalchok, Nepal. It was at Lake Forest, working as a server in the college cafeteria, that she met the chef who would become her husband. Her host family from Freiburg, Ulrike and Joachim, kept supporting her through those years too, sending her fifty dollars a month, until her junior year, when she was working twenty hours a week and earning a little of her own money and told them to stop and save it instead, so that one day they could come and see her graduate from university in the United States. They did! The harder test in those final months at Lake Forest was the job search itself, racing against the ninety-day window her student visa allowed her after graduation. The call came on the very last day of her final exams. She walked out of an investment class, her phone rang, and a recruiter offered her a rotational credit analyst role on the spot. She said yes before the details had even landed, then stood outside the cafeteria letting the tears come. That job grew into two years of rotational training and, this year, a promotion to portfolio manager. Alongside her career, she has stayed involved with the non-profit Education Global.
Nine years on, Shanta still keeps in touch with Joachim and Ulrike and with the teachers who helped her find her footing, and she is already thinking about the visit back to Freiburg. Looking back at everything RBC gave her, it is not one dramatic moment that stands out but the accumulation of small, hard-won skills: the discipline of a full timetable, the patience to sit through extra English sessions until the words came easier, the confidence to organise a cricket match with classmates from a dozen countries, the odd practicality of knowing how to fix her own bicycle. None of it happened quickly, and none of it happened alone. It came from a frightened girl who kept showing up anyway, and from the people around her who made sure she never had to do it by herself.
