Anika Chowdhury ’14 – Decade Award 

Growing up in Bangladesh, Anika Chowdhury never pictured herself going to college in Central Minnesota. “My friends were off to big cities,” she recalls. But her older brother Abdel had chosen the accounting program at Saint John’s, and her family was reluctant to let 18-year-old Anika jet off to the other side of the Earth completely on her own. So Saint Ben’s was sort of chosen for her. 

“And I didn’t expect to like it,” she says, with conviction. “It was just not my scene. But I fell in love with Minnesota. I was supposed to transfer out two years later, but I never did.” 

Anika loved the liberal arts environment, double-majoring in psychology and communication. She embraced the Benedictine values. She took winter walks in the Arboretum and joined the Cultural Affairs Board. And she served for three years as a resident assistant. Pay attention to that last bit, it’s going to be important. 

A year or so after graduation, Anika returned to Bangladesh. She was accepted into an ultra-competitive corporate training program in Dhaka, but quickly decided it wasn’t for her. She went home to Chittagong to recalibrate and decide what she wanted to do. 

Family friends pointed out a progressive new university in the area – Asian University for Women (AUW)  – suggesting she would be a good fit. “Initially I applied there for a lot of positions and never got a call back,” Anika says. “They’re pretty picky about who they pick.” 

But when she applied to become the associate director of residence life, “and they saw my res life experience, they called me in for an interview.” 

She was the youngest person in senior management – under 25 in a world of 40+ year-olds. But she had ideas. “One of the things I did that was really inspired by my time at Saint Ben’s was creating a residential curriculum,” she explains. 

AUW educates women from across the continent. That diversity in the dorms presents opportunities for growth, for learning … and for challenges. “For example,” she says, “a Muslim student will pray five times a day. And many schools of Islam believe that you cannot have idols of any sort in the room where you pray. But for a Hindu person, an image or symbol is used as a way of accessing God – so they obviously want to keep that in their room. 

“It was really fascinating to have those dialogues,” she says. “I felt like I was looking at my people – at Asia – from a completely different place,” she says. “I always thought, ‘I’m Bangladeshi. We’re all kind of similar in the sub-continent. I understand Bhutanese culture better than, like, an American would. But now I realize it’s also true that we have so much to learn about each other.” 

Anika moved up and took on new positions and challenges at AUW. But she has students who continue to reach out and thank her for elevating what had been a very basic residential arrangement into a real growth and development experience. 

Today she is the assistant director of the office of the vice chancellor at the much larger Independent University-Bangladesh in Dhaka. She worked with the vice chancellor on major projects like an ambitious scholarship program and a center for protecting and preserving endangered indigenous Asian languages. 

“I think Bangladesh could do with administrative people who are open to change in the higher education sector,” she says. “And my ultimate goal is to have my own school here.” 

In ten years she’s come a long way, thanks very much in part to her time as an RA.