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March 2026 Sometimes trips don't go as planned. As a planner™, I usually make sure this doesn't happen to me. I'm talking Plan A, Plan B, Plan C, and several backup plans to accompany those plans. However, as I made my way south - literally - to spend my spring break in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, things went both literally and figuratively south. The plan was to meet up with friends in Brazil while also getting the full Rio hostel experience. As it turned out, Rio had plans for

January 2026 I’ve known my mother my entire life, yet there are versions of her I have never met. I don’t know what made her laugh when she was younger, what cities she dreamed of seeing, or what kind of woman she was before responsibility took over. I know her as a mother - tireless, practical, endlessly giving - but never as a young woman who once wanted things for herself. Growing up, love in our home was rarely spoken aloud. It lived in routines and quiet acts of care. My

November 2025 When La La Land (2016) came out, I forced my cousin (shoutout Shimu apu) to watch it with me in the theatre. She hated it. People left during intermission (musicals are not really the scene in Bangladesh, unfortunately). But I stayed the entire time. Something about the setting and the message hit me, and I knew my life was forever changed by that movie. My friends all know I am a La La Land snob - a proud one, but a snob regardless. Since that day in 2016, I’ve

November 2025 A big part of my identity has always been being and working for women. Back home in Bangladesh, I spent six years working in women-centric non-profits. Naturally, the first organization I joined at my college was WILL - a Women in Living Learning program that entails a minor in Gender Studies and, more importantly, a community for life. Fast forward three years, and I found myself on a journey with four of my WILL friends - Daniel, Vuola, Andi, and Susanne - and

January 2026 I think we are often quite careless with our hometowns. Maybe it is the comfort of familiarity that makes us take our cities for granted. Whenever I go back to Dhaka, I am so consumed by nostalgia and my loved ones that I sometimes wonder - have I ever truly explored my city? On my trip to Bangkok, I met up with one of my friends from Bocconi, Aryan, who has been living there for a while. We met on my last night, and as he listed places to explore and things to d

October 2025 Everyone has a city that they idealize in their heads. In my childhood bedroom, for reasons I couldn’t quite articulate, I had a retro poster of New York City on my wall. At that age, I didn’t know what the city truly entailed - I didn’t even know how to pronounce it properly - but I knew it pulled me in. I knew it represented something big, something bright, something I wanted to be part of. Naturally, on my Google Keep, I saved a note that said, “Open this in t

August 2025 As I geared up to return from my study abroad adventures in Milan, I had a summer in Washington D.C. waiting for me. Finding short-term housing in D.C. is notoriously difficult, but somehow, I stumbled upon the perfect intern housing in the heart of Capitol Hill - ready for a summer of finding my rhythm and making the city my own. I had one goal in mind - to make the neighborhood mine. Capitol Hill is an interesting place. On the surface, it’s the center of Americ

March 2024 For spring break sophomore year, a bunch of my friends and I found ourselves on a school-funded trip to San Francisco, California. Given the nature of the city, naturally, the trip was an entrepreneurship trip - and it was also my first time in California. I’d always heard that San Francisco was the place for big ideas, but what I didn’t realize was how those ideas seem to float in the air there - how creativity feels less like something people do and more like som

March 2025 What’s the first thing you think of when you think of Milan? Maybe the Duomo, the gelato, or - if you’re like most people - Milan being the fashion capital of the world. I’d heard plenty of tales about Milanese chic, but when Fashion Week rolled around from February 25 to March 3, 2025, and I happened to be living in the city - I knew I had to make Milan my runway. This, unlike most things in my life, was completely unplanned. Piri and I were hanging out when she c

June 2025 People often say it’s not the journey that matters, it’s the destination. I used to take that quite literally - which is probably why I traveled every single weekend for five months when I lived in Milan. Out of all those weekends, I took the 6 a.m. Ryanair flight a grand total of seven times - which also means I spent seven nights sleeping in either Milan Bergamo or Milan Malpensa airport. Now, the question everyone asks: why? Well, Milan’s airports were clearly no

May 2023 No one in my family has ever been to Europe. So naturally, Europe always felt like a distant dream. While I knew families who immigrated to the U.S. or the U.K., I didn’t know anyone who raved about Parisian lights or Italian summers. Europe felt like something that belonged in postcards, not in reach. Until Prague opened a door for me. Prague, Czech Republic The summer after my freshman year, I was determined - I was going to crack open the doors of Europe. I applie

June 2023 Everyone has that one place that’s lived in their imagination forever. For some of my friends, it’s Paris, or maybe Italy, or Japan. For me, it’s always been Switzerland. Ever since I was a baby, I’d hear my parents and relatives rave about the “most beautiful place on Earth.” It was like Switzerland had cast a spell on them. So when I planned a trip there after my study abroad program in Prague, my mom didn’t care about the other five countries on my itinerary - al

April 2025 Colors often carry emotions. For me, golden means joy, warmth, and that rare feeling when everything aligns so perfectly it almost glows. It’s not easy to feel golden - those moments in life where you stop and think, this is it, this is perfect. My Easter break trip to the Amalfi Coast with my dear friends Coni and Nicole was one of those moments. I remember being ecstatic when I heard that Coni - my number one travel buddy - was planning an Amalfi tour during her

April 2025 I am your resident Type A - in fact, I would challenge you to find someone more Type A than me. I love lists and structure and to-dos and making plans. Usually, it’s fantastic - it’s how I was able to travel every single weekend when I was in Bocconi. But sometimes, even the most Type A person needs a break. And maybe the place to take that break is Portugal. The Portuguese chaos started before I even got there. Whereas all my other trips were carefully slotted int

March 2025 Having moved around places and schools so much, I’ve built different groups of friends - almost like parallel worlds that never quite collide. One thing I had never experienced, though, was when those worlds overlapped. For my trip to Rome, that changed. Rome became the meeting point of my multiverse - where two of my best friends from Bocconi, Piri and Diya, met one of my closest UR friends, Will. Before the trip began, I was nervous. Would my worlds get along? W

March 2025 The thing about studying abroad is how quickly connections form — strangers one week, travel partners the next. For me, one of the trips that cemented those early friendships was our whirlwind journey through Tuscany. My main partner on the trip was Coni, and together we spent a weekend in Florence. Everyone always said Florence was the favorite Italian city, and it lived up to every bit of the hype. The Duomo, the art tucked in every alley, the way the whole city

March 2025 One of my biggest goals for my semester abroad was visiting Scandinavia. In my head, I wanted the trip to play out like a...

March 2025 Missing is a state of mind. Since leaving home for college, I’ve felt as though there’s always an empty space in my heart — a...

February 2025 In an alternate universe, I would have been studying abroad in Barcelona, Spain - if it hadn’t been for the Spanish...

March 2025 One evening in February, Pauline, Baptiste, and I met over aperitivo with one goal in mind: figure out where we should go for...