HGSE Admissions Blog

In this reflection, Vani Gupta shares how her time at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) strengthened her commitment to building education systems that expand opportunity for girls and underserved communities. Drawing on her experience leading large-scale education reforms in India, Vani reflects on how HGSE helped her move beyond implementation to a deeper understanding of evidence, policy design, and systems change. Vani argues that lived experience is not a barrier to belonging in elite academic spaces, but a powerful credential that can drive meaningful change in education.

Vani Gupta (she/her)

There is a girl I think about often. Her name is Rukhsar. She was in fifth grade when I first met her at a government school in Delhi during my undergraduate internship placement – always arriving late, calloused hands, tired eyes. She cooked and cleaned before school, cared for younger siblings, and still showed up. The public education system was doing very little to meet her halfway.

I grew up in a community where girls like Rukhsar were quietly steered toward marriage, not education. I was lucky enough to rebel against certain similar expectations. But rebellion and luck are not policy. They are not scalable. And so, almost a decade later, everything I have done professionally has been in service of building the systems that girls like Rukhsar deserve because the system finally saw them.

That is what brought me to the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Before arriving in Cambridge, I spent five years embedded in the Delhi Government’s education department, first as a fellow in the Deputy Chief Minister’s office, then as Senior Program Manager, spending most of my time on what became India’s first full-time virtual public school, the Delhi Model Virtual School. We served around 20,400 students, many of them girls from underserved communities who couldn’t access traditional schooling due to financial, geographic, or social barriers.

I designed program blueprints, built monitoring systems, created competency-based assessments, negotiated public-private partnerships, and presented impact analyses to the Education Minister. At Harvard, I also consulted for UNICEF across Central Asia, supporting Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan in redesigning national assessment systems, work that was later published by Harvard Professor Fernando Reimers.

I had done a lot. And yet I kept bumping into the edges of what I knew. I could implement. I could manage. But I wanted to understand deeply and rigorously why some reforms stick and others collapse, how to read evidence critically, and how to design policy that holds up beyond a single government’s tenure. HGSE’s Ed.M. in Education Policy and Analysis was the answer.

I expected intellectual rigor. I found that. What I did not fully anticipate was the room.

My classmates at HGSE come from Kenya, Brazil, rural Colombia, and everywhere between. Some are classroom teachers. Some are policy directors. Some are coming straight from their undergraduate studies. What unites us is that every single person arrived carrying a problem they refuse to stop caring about. When you sit in a seminar with people like that, something shifts. You stop seeing your own perspective as the natural starting point. You start asking better questions.

Our conversations spill out of classrooms and into dining halls, late-night study sessions, and impromptu debates on the Charles River path. I have learned as much from my peers as from any course syllabus, which, at HGSE, is saying something.

The coursework itself has been transformative. Statistical Methods gave me tools to interrogate data I used to take at face value. Global and Comparative Education Policy has pushed me to borrow smartly from other contexts rather than assume India’s challenges are unique. I’ve cross-registered at MIT Sloan, built an AI chatbot for financial literacy as a course project, co-founded the AI & Education Policy Club, and contributed to research across three Harvard research centers simultaneously. The pace has been real, and so is the growth.

My long-term goal is to help build the infrastructure that makes good education policy possible at scale: stronger teacher training systems, data-driven resource allocation, and community-driven reforms that actually reach girls in the places the system has historically overlooked. I want to work on national reforms that don’t evaporate when governments change because I have seen what happens when they do.

Your lived experience is your credential. Not a supplement to it, the thing itself.

I came to HGSE having never written a formal research paper in the Western academic style. I came, having spent my career inside government bureaucracies, not think tanks or PhD programs. I came as an international student navigating visa anxieties, a new country, and the quiet weight of feeling like I had to prove I belonged in every room I walked into.

And then I got here, and I realized: the fact that I had stood inside a crumbling government school was precisely what I had to offer. HGSE made space for that. More than that, it asked for it.

If you are sitting somewhere right now, wondering whether your path is too unconventional, too practice-heavy, too far from the academic mainstream, I am writing this for you. Your story belongs in these rooms.