On Academic Excellence and More Alumna interaction-Ketaki Saxena (Class of 2014)

The Department of English organized its fourth Alumna-Interaction on 27 May 2020. The Speaker for the day was Ms. Ketaki Saxena who is an alumna from the class of 2014 and currently a Research Scholar at JNU, New Delhi and also Guest Lecturer at Sh. Guru Tegh Bahadur Khalsa College, Univ. of Delhi. During the session entitled “On Academic Excellence and More”, Ms. Saxena talked about her experiences as an Undergraduate (B.A Hons.-English) student at the University; her keenness for academics and bagging the gold medal for topping the programme; her branching out into advertising and marketing communication to broaden her skill-set by working as a Social Media Manager; and pursuing MA in English Literature from IGNOU alongside.

She then shared her success with the NET-JRF exam and with that her return to academics by her taking up Doctoral Studies. She gave very useful preparation-tips to the students with regard to the NET exam and emphasized conceptual clarity, notes-making and thorough grasp over the study-material, for cracking the exam. Besides the above, she also mentioned the importance of acquiring digital literacy and enrolling in open source courses being offered by Yale and Harvard Universities to make the most of the lockdown period! Finally, Ms. Saxena took the participants through her topic of research, viz. Eco-criticism in selected contemporary fictional works and her publications in the area. She dwelled on the emergence of environment-consciousness in literary works, especially in relation to decentralizing and dismantling commonly-held ideas about the socio-psychological treatment; the social approach; and, the political ideology in the works of Ruskin Bond, Amitav Ghosh and Arundhati Roy, respectively. The session came to a close with the students interacting with the Speaker to get some more information and insights into each of the areas that she went into during her Talk.