Fifteen years ago, Tessa Adzemovic spent a summer filling journals. She wrote about the sounds and smells of Delhi, about riding auto rickshaws, about being sick in the heat, and about encounters she was still trying to make sense of. She wrote about community, service, and what one person owed another.
This year, as the Summer in South Asia (SiSA) fellowship marks its 20th anniversary, Adzemovic opened those journals again. Some entries made her cringe. Others stopped her. “I see a younger self that actually reminds me of who I want to be,” says Adzemovic (A.B. ’13, M.S. ’18, M.D. ’19).
Since 2006, the Center for South Asian Studies’ SiSA fellowship has supported more than 120 U-M undergraduates as they pursued internships and independent projects in India. SiSA Fellows receive $4,500 to cover all costs associated with traveling to India, living there, and traveling after the internship or research period. They stay between four weeks and four months, and undergrads from any academic discipline are eligible.
The experiences have been as varied as the students themselves. But two decades offer an opportunity to look beyond what fellows accomplished during a summer and ask a question that can only really be answered with time: What stayed?
For Adzemovic and Neel Swamy (B.S. ’18), another former SiSA fellow, the answers reach into their work as health care professionals today. But neither tells a simple story about a summer abroad determining what came next. Looking back, they see something less linear: people they still think about, assumptions that became harder to hold, questions they never entirely resolved, and moments whose significance grew clearer only after they came home.
When Adzemovic thinks about her 2012 SiSA summer, she is transported to the Hazrat Inayat Khan Center at the Hope Project in Nizamuddin Basti in New Delhi. She had arrived in India without a clear plan to become a physician. A French major at U-M, she initially spent much of her time working in a preschool nursery.
Gradually, she found herself drawn to the health clinic, where she worked alongside physicians named Dr. Jyoti, Dr. Gill, and others. The clinic could be busy, with people moving in and out and physicians seeing dozens of patients over a few hours. What Adzemovic remembers 15 years later, however, is not the pace but the attention the doctors managed to give within it. They held patients’ hands. They asked about their lives. And Dr. Jyoti told the young Michigan student something that Adzemovic still remembers: “We empower kids to speak, especially at the doctor’s office.”
Today, Adzemovic is a physician trained in both internal medicine and pediatrics, caring for adults and children. She still carries that lesson into her own examination rooms. “I now try to embody that in my own practice,” she says.
The professional consequence of the summer was immediate. Adzemovic returned to Michigan knowing that she wanted to pursue medicine. But 15 years later, she is less interested in drawing a straight line between Delhi and the career she ultimately chose. As a student, she imagined life as much more linear. Now she thinks of it more like climbing a mountain, where the route doubles back, and seemingly small decisions can alter where a person ends up.
She calls them “sliding door” moments. She might have returned to Michigan and become a French professor, she says. That life might have been just as fulfilling. Instead, she walked into a clinic in Delhi and encountered another possibility. “I don’t think I realized this ‘sliding door’ concept,” she says, that “something very different could have happened if I showed up just a little later to the airport, maybe.”
The anniversary has given her reason to revisit not only that decision but what else was beginning to take shape around it. At 20, Adzemovic was encountering forms of medicine and care that did not always fit her assumptions. She had grown up largely secular and initially viewed religion as something that could complicate medical decision-making. In Delhi, she watched physicians speak with patients about family, religion, and spirituality as part of caring.
Some practices startled her. In one clinic, she remembers struggling to understand why patients were sometimes given placebo treatments when other medical options were limited. Yet what stayed with her was less the treatment than what surrounded it: a physician spending time talking with a patient about their life, children, beliefs, and hopes for getting better. It complicated her idea of what healing could look like.
Other questions from Delhi have proved harder to answer. Adzemovic has continued to work in global health, including later living in Uganda. With experience came a more critical understanding of what it means for an American student or health professional to enter another community. She now thinks about voluntourism, cultural appropriation, and extraction, language she did not necessarily have when she was 20.
She remembers the physicians in Delhi differently, too. Dr. Jyoti and Dr. Gill were already responsible for crowded clinics and dozens of patients. Still, they made time for her. “I worry about the people who really gave me a lot of time in those moments,” she says. Was her presence useful to them? What did she take from an experience that gave her so much? What does responsible participation in global health require? She does not resolve those questions retrospectively. “I don’t have a conclusive thought,” she says. “But I think it started a lifelong conversation for me.”
A Familiar Place, Made Unfamiliar
Neel Swamy remembers an arrival.
In May 2017, at age 20, he landed in Bengaluru, India, to begin his SiSA fellowship with a public health nonprofit. He remembers traveling down the road from the airport toward the apartment where he would live. Bengaluru was his mother’s hometown, and both of Swamy’s parents were born in India. He had visited before. But this arrival felt different. “I wasn’t in India simply to visit family,” he says. “I was here to have an immersive learning experience.” He remembers feeling almost as though he had been “airdropped” into a different life. That discomfort would become one of the most consequential parts of the summer.
Swamy was entering not only his first substantial workplace but a workplace in a country to which he felt deeply connected and yet did not entirely belong. His coworkers occasionally pointed out behaviors they considered particularly American. During one presentation, someone asked him to slow down because they couldn’t understand his accent.
He became conscious of occupying an in-between position: India could feel, in his words, “in an ancestral way, home” without being home in the everyday sense it was for the people working beside him. At 20, he experienced that gap personally. “I felt a little bit of shame around that cultural divide,” he says. “I felt like I wasn’t doing enough to prove my Indian-ness to them.”
Nearly a decade later, he interprets the discomfort differently. The point, he has come to understand, was not to prove that he belonged. It was to become more aware of what he brought with him—the assumptions, experiences, and identities that shape how a person enters a workplace or community, and how others perceive them in return.
That realization followed him into health care. Swamy had studied public health at Michigan before SiSA and already knew many of the academic principles surrounding global health and ethical community engagement. In Bengaluru, those ideas became personal. “We can’t extricate ourselves and who we are and our perspectives from the work that we do,” he says.
He was also seeing public health practiced rather than discussed in a classroom. The organization worked on health education with communities across South India, addressing issues including infectious disease prevention, sanitation, hygiene, and chronic disease. Swamy began to see a way to connect his interest in medicine with questions about the larger systems shaping people’s health. By the time he returned to U-M and began applying to pharmacy school, he deliberately sought programs that would allow him to pursue a doctorate in pharmacy alongside a master’s degree in public health.
His interests continued to evolve. Swamy trained as a pharmacist in psychiatry and behavioral health and initially worked in clinical pharmacy. Last year, he moved fully into public health. His work is now domestic rather than primarily global, focusing on behavioral health, drug overdose prevention, and people living with serious mental illness.
He considers SiSA a catalyst, but not because it gave him a fixed destination. “It wasn’t until this fellowship that I really saw myself doing it as a career,” he says. What has lasted even more, he says, is a way of approaching the work. As an undergraduate, Swamy tended to think knowledge made a person useful. If you knew more than everyone else in the room, perhaps you could have the greatest impact. Bengaluru began to unsettle that idea.
Over time, he came to place greater value on relationship-building and what he calls the “emotional stamina” to stand alongside a patient, colleague, or loved one without assuming expertise provides every answer. “I think the undergraduate version of me had started learning how to approach things through curiosity rather than certainty,” he says.
Today, he tries to be the person in the room who can tolerate disagreement and uncertainty, and who is willing to say when a team simply does not know enough yet. “The seeds of that line of thinking were planted, I think, during my time in South Asia,” he says.
What 20 Years Makes Visible
The immediate outcomes of a fellowship are relatively easy to record. A student completed an internship. Conducted research. Lived somewhere unfamiliar. Clarified a career goal. Returned to Michigan with something to put on a résumé.
Time measures different things.
SiSA’s 20th anniversary makes it possible to ask former fellows not simply what they did, but what they understand now that they could not have understood then. For Adzemovic, the answer was a clinic in Delhi and the physicians whose care she still invokes in her own practice. It is a more expansive understanding of healing and spirituality, but also unresolved questions about privilege, global health, and what it means to enter another community with good intentions.
For Swamy, it was a summer in his mother’s hometown that complicated his relationship to India more rather than less. It includes a career in public health, but also the recognition that knowledge alone is insufficient, that listening, relationships, and the willingness to be wrong are forms of expertise, too.
Both were around 20 when they went. Swamy thinks that timing is central to what makes the fellowship powerful. At an age when he was still figuring out what adulthood meant, SiSA trusted him with unusual responsibility: to find an opportunity, make decisions about how to use the fellowship, and then show up in India accountable to the people who had agreed to work with him. Twenty years of SiSA means 20 years of young people being given some version of that trust. It also means that there are now generations of former fellows far enough removed from their summers to recognize consequences that could not have appeared in an end-of-program report.
The distance matters.
Adzemovic thought the important story was that India helped her become a doctor. Fifteen years later, she sees a web of smaller influences: how she listens to children, how she talks with patients, how she thinks about global health, and how she understands the accidents and choices that make up a life. Swamy wanted to overcome the feeling of being culturally out of place in Bengaluru. Now he values what the discomfort taught him about humility. Neither describes the experience as something neatly completed when the summer ended.
And perhaps that is one of the things an anniversary can reveal. A fellowship’s influence is not necessarily contained in the months a student is away. Some experiences have to be returned to before their meaning becomes visible.
When asked what a student preparing for SiSA today should pay attention to, Swamy returned to the discomfort he once wanted to overcome. “Take a journal with you,” he says. “Pay attention to your feelings.” Fifteen years earlier, Adzemovic had done exactly that. This year, she opened hers again.
Top photo: Adobe Stock Images; Block M flag photo: Courtesy of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies
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