The worst monsoon season in 30 years forced Surya Kalra ’06 and her research team to flee the floodwaters inundating Bihar. The experience gave Surya, an anthropology major from Sterling, Ill., a real sense of what life is like in one of India’s poorest states – and changed her thinking about what she wants to do with her life.

“Whatever I do has to have a link to social service,” she says after her summer in New Delhi and Bihar working with the Society for Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA) – research funded by a Richter Fellowship.

“Anthropology is always examining its own methodology and the impact its research has on the world,” says Surya, who is now studying abroad in Nicaragua. “I wanted to find out more about how the research we do actually helps the community. My anthropology professor [Jeffrey Tobin] suggested I take a look at PRIA for answers to some of my questions.”

Surya was assigned to an organization in Bihar that has helped organize adolescent girls into 66 collectives that incorporate the girls’ own experiences in offering health and education training. “They try to make the way they teach as egalitarian as the outcome they hope to achieve,” says Surya, adding that the collectives have been effective in changing attitudes in communities that have traditionally devalued women.

Surya now plans to go to Nicaragua to participate in the School for International Training where she’ll conduct an independent study project on the women who led the literacy movement in the 1980s. “And I’m positive I’ll go back to India at some point,” she says. “Despite the heat and the poverty, it has an amazing pull over you. I felt welcomed there.”