This week, I taught my first class at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. It’s a 12-week master’s course on identity-driven journalism, a subject that I’ve pursued in various shapes and forms over the last decade of working in media that has crystallized into what I consider to be not only my professional passion, but my personal mission. The class will explore how our identities fundamentally change how we understand the world and underscore how harnessing our unique perspectives — and creating space for those whose perspectives are routinely sidelined — is a critical skill for any journalist who wants to create work that deeply resonates, cultivates empathy, and creates real change. It’s a particularly poignant moment for me because NYU was always my dream school — the pinnacle of what I thought education should be and could look like. As an undergrad, I was accepted into NYU’s Steinhardt school with a partial scholarship, but my family was still unable to afford my tuition. Rather than take on the burden of debt, I ended up going to Stony Brook University, where I had been awarded a near-full scholarship. It was a difficult decision that I grappled with for many years, so to be teaching at NYU now, over a decade later, is an emotional full-circle moment my younger self could have never imagined. It’s also a reminder that our paths may not always take shape how we’d envision and that growth is very rarely linear. We always arrive at where we’re meant to be when we’re meant to be there.