Navya Malik is a senior majoring in computer science in the College of Engineering with a minor in entrepreneurship and innovation in the Broad College of Business. She is an international student from Delhi, India and an intern in International Studies and Programs, where she develops and manages web content, creates user-friendly website experiences, and helps improve website functionality, accessibility and overall user experience.
I had been at MSU two weeks when my mom asked me on a video call, "Have you found your people yet?" I hesitated for a second and then eventually lied and said yes.
The truth was messier. I'd been to three Indian Student Organization events, exchanged numbers with dozens of people and felt lonelier each time. Everyone seemed to bond so easily, making inside jokes I didn't understand, planning dinners or trips to the arcade where I wasn't invited. I smiled through it all, then walked back to my dorm all alone wondering what was wrong with me. I kept repeating the same question in my head over and over again. Why couldn't I just fit in?
Back in my home country, making friends was second nature to me. We grew up together, shared the same language, the same references, and the same understanding of how the world worked. Here, every conversation felt like translating myself and, somewhere in that translation, I kept getting lost.
One night, I sat on the bank of the Red Cedar River, not only to admire its beauty, but because it was the only place I could cry without my roommate asking if I was okay. I finally asked myself the question I'd been avoiding: What if I never find “my people”? What if they didn't exist here? Or worse, what if I wasn't meant to find them at all?
Cold wind cut through my hoodie. I had no friends. Everything felt wrong. My phone sat beside me on the bench, silent. No texts. No missed calls. No one wondering where I'd disappeared.
I should have been devastated, but instead, something strange happened: I felt lighter. As if some invisible weight I'd been carrying since I arrived finally had been set down.
I thought about that morning, walking into my ISS lecture and asking the professor about postcolonial narratives, stumbling over the words, feeling my accent thick in my mouth. No friends sitting beside me for moral support. No one to exchange weird glances with afterward. Just me and my question.
That afternoon I'd spent three hours in the library, working on my first project for Introduction to Python, determined to impress the professor. I was so invested that I forgot to eat lunch. When I finally looked up, the sun had shifted across the windows; I realized I hadn't checked my phone once. Hadn't felt lonely. Hadn't needed anyone to validate that the work mattered.
I began to realize something important. When I said yes, I had found my people, I did so for two reasons. I didn't want my mom to worry, but I also felt like my success was hanging in balance.
Despite feeling lost and lonely, I was handling it. Making decisions. Showing up to classes. Speaking up when needed. Navigating a foreign country, a massive campus, and a completely different education system. Surviving. And maybe survival was its own kind of success.
Sitting by the Red Cedar, I realized I'd been asking the wrong question.
Instead of asking, "Have I found my people yet?", the question ought to be, "Have I found myself yet?"
Because here's what no one tells you about leaving home. You don't just leave your people behind. You leave behind the version of yourself that only existed in relation to them. Daughter, friend, sister, the girl everyone expected you to be. Back home in India, I was always someone's something. My identity was a web of relationships, each thread connecting me to someone else's expectations, someone else's understanding of who I was.
Here, for the first time, I was just me. Undefined. Unwitnessed. Standing there, not sure who I was supposed to become yet. And maybe that wasn't failure. Maybe that was what I needed, even if I didn’t like it. Maybe my parents hadn't sent me 8,000 miles away just to find a new version of home. Maybe they'd sent me to discover who I could be when I had to build myself from nothing.
I did find people eventually, but they felt different. I was choosing them, not clinging to fill a void. Last month, my mom asked again: "Have you found your people yet?" This time, I didn't lie. "I found myself first," I told her. "The rest followed."
Success at MSU isn’t replicating the community I left behind. It’s learning that I could be whole even when no one was watching. I still had bad days, but I stopped being afraid of it.
Malik’s student view was originally submitted as an essay entry during the 2025-26 essay contest for the Office of International Students and Scholar where it won Best Undergraduate Essay.