Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, Journalism & Scholarship
Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, Journalism & Scholarship
Embedded Files
Journal for Health Equity
Journal for Health Equity
Issue Three
Issue Three
2026
2026
Featured Author: Shriya Pingle
Featured Author: Shriya Pingle
Shriya's Capstone slides from her presentation at the Writing Center
Shriya Pingle is a premed student graduating this Spring 2026 with a Psychology Major and Minors in Biological Sciences and Chemistry.
Throughout her undergraduate career, she has worked not one but four jobs: as Level III Master writing tutor at the Writing Center, as Crisis Text Line Counselor, as Research Assistant in the Cognition of Second Language Acquisition Lab, and as Senior Resident Advisor.
Shriya's senior Honors Capstone project, First-Year Floors, was inspired by the latter: a book-length autofictional collection of linked stories to shed light on the often overlooked work RAs do as first responders to first-year students struggling with serious mental health crises, and reflect on what she has learned through those experiences. In her Senior Spring, while she completed her Capstone, Shriya also enrolled in English 388, Writing for the Health Professions: From Madness to Mental Health, with Dr. Bridget English, and had the opportunity to consider some of the same questions but within a scholarly framework--what research shows about best to support students contending not only with the first experience of living away from home but with the first onset of serious mental health symptoms, like psychosis.
Below Shriya discusses her process and how the two final pieces published here--"No Student Should Feel Like a Burden" and "Unburdening Students: Building Communities of Care on College Campuses"--emerged from 388 and her Capstone, as ways to think through her RA experience within the different rhetorics and potentials of two very different genres.
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Yes, Resident Assistants (RAs) help you get back into your dorm room after you get locked out. What people often don't know though is how we RAs often serve as the first line of defense when on-call emergencies occur--especially student mental health crises. Therefore, through my Honor's Capstone project, First-Year Floors, I wanted to raise awareness and share the stories of RAs trying to navigate these difficult situations with the residents. First-Year Floors is an autofictional series of linked stories from the perspective of RA Soniya Patil, a South Asian, workaholic pre-med student. RA Soniya works hard to uncover, reflect, and highlight the systemic barriers and adversities that first-year students often face.
"No Student Should Feel Like a Burden" is an excerpt from First-Year Floors, and in this story, we see RA Soniya working together with her fellow RAs to support a student going through a mental health crisis. In this situation, RA Soniya tries her best to support the student from a procedural sense but feels unsure if, institutionally, she is doing all she can for the student. This leads to the argumentative research paper titled, "Unburdening Students: Building Communities of Care on College Campuses" in which I argue that colleges are actually well-suited to support students if they foster collaboration among faculty, clinicians, disability services, and peer networks to create a multifaceted model of community and care. Put together, these pieces ask what it really means to support students who are struggling in ways that are not always understood.
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