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Columns::January 21, 2003
Common ground: Talking about race: UGA students explore sensitive topics
Federal judge will give annual Holmes-Hunter Lecture
New lecture series marks Founders’ Day
UGA honored for ‘transforming’ its school counseling program
Inaugural research grants awarded
Teaching Academy inducts new members
Power supply
Retirees
Kudos
Minority recruitment at UGA
Floored by his own chair
Campus News
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| During the past 15 years, Kavita Pandit has made a name for herself as a researcher with work on migration and Third World development. Her research now focuses on the influx of high-tech workers from India to the United States. (Photo by Peter Frey) |
Professor works to promote geography to ‘global’ community
By Phil Williams
phil@franklin.uga.edu
In December 1978, Kavita Pandit left India for the first time and set off on her first airline flight--one that took her a world away. From Bombay, where the temperature rarely drops below 60 degrees, she flew to Rome and London, then on to New York City, finally arriving in Columbus, Ohio, where she met America and winter about the same time.
“In 24 hours, my world was altered,” she says. Coming from a major city where public transportation was everywhere, she quickly found that, without a car, travel in America can be next to impossible. “America was supposed to be the country of the free, but I never felt more trapped and isolated.”
The problems didn’t last long, however. And in Ohio, she not only found a new country--she discovered a new career as well. As a faculty member of the geography department at UGA since 1987, she’s been associate head of the department for two years and will take over the job alone this summer.
For Pandit, there is a great distance between her childhood in Bombay and an academic career in Athens.
Her home was a happy one, with her father an engineer (who earned a doctorate at Harvard) and her mother a homemaker who had a bachelor’s degree in philosophy. As the second of four daughters, Pandit attended the excellent Bombay International School, which prepared her well for Bombay University, which she attended, earning a degree in architecture in 1978. With an older sister already in graduate school in the United States, Pandit decided to work on a master’s degree in city and regional planning at Ohio State, which she finished in 1981.
“I was very idealistic at the time and wanted to go home to work, so I did, but I’d loved those three years in Columbus, and that time stayed with me,” she says.
During her year back in India, Pandit worked on rural development projects that took her to “fairly remote” parts of the country, where she worked with villagers on numerous problems. As the year passed, however, she realized she was quite unhappy, so she came back to Ohio State with the intention of pursuing a doctoral degree in planning; however, since Ohio State did not offer a planning Ph.D. at that time, she enrolled in the department of geography, and once there, she knew she’d found her niche.
“It was the happiest accident of my life,” she says. “I really found a home in this discipline.” She came to UGA for her first academic appointment and has remained here since, being promoted through the ranks to full professor.
During the past 15 years, she has made her name as a researcher with work on migration and Third World development. Her research now focuses on the influx of high-tech workers from India to the United States. While India is rapidly now developing its own high-tech industries, the boom of the 1990s brought thousands of Indians to the United States--many highly paid engineers and managers, but also a great number of less-well-paid computer programmers. Pandit hopes to find out how immigrants in this dual track fared.
She also has become something of a spokesman for the discipline of geography itself, which, if recent news reports are any indication, is being lost to K-12 school children at an alarming rate. While academic geography long ago took on problems related to such fields as demographics, satellite mapping and climatology, American school children seem hard-pressed even to find the Pacific Ocean on a world map.
Working through the national and regional associations of geographers, Pandit has worked hard to promote geography and keep the discipline on the minds of educators. As the world becomes a global community, she believes, anything less would be a mistake.
“I think it’s crucial that we work hard to ensure the health of geography,” she says. “Geographers do research that’s very important to American policy and even to the well-being of the planet. It’s about all of us--about our daily life.” |
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