convocation

Diksha Venugopal Named 2025 Convocation Student Speaker

A clinician by training, Venugopal studied epidemiology and biostatistics at SPH to help further her interests in cancer research.

For Diksha Venugopal, making the most out of her grad school experience in a new and unfamiliar city meant devoting 10 to 15 hours each week to each class, learning a host of new terms, and wrestling with seemingly arcane programming languages.  

But, as she soon learned, it also meant taking free physical education classes such as rock climbing, joining several organizations, serving as president of the SPH Student Senate, and making what are likely to be lifelong friends.

Venugopal, the 2025 Commencement Student Speaker, says that her time at SPH meant creating the most of the myriad options available to students, both in the classroom and in the city beyond. SPH was a solid fit with her career plans because it was one of the few schools she considered that offered the specific concentration that she wanted—epidemiology and biostatistics—yet one that also leaned heavily into practical experience.

As a clinician in integrative medicine from India, Venugopal says she had little knowledge of the kind of work that happens in public health. What she did realize, soon after embarking on her career as a clinician, is that it wasn’t the right path for her at that time. “I just knew that I wanted to get into upstream interventions rather than working downstream. Maybe in the future I’ll get back to it, but for now I really want to explore research, and I really want to bridge the gap between what I saw when I was handling patients and what research could help them achieve.”

At SPH, Venugopal says she found “rebirth” in studying, which was comforting and familiar terrain to her after her undergraduate and clinical studies in India. “I got deep into it,” she said, laughing at the memory. She followed advice to ease into her SPH experience by focusing solely on school, at least initially. “I feel especially your first semester here is so important because if you don’t have a solid foundation, you are going to struggle.”

This is a question we often ask faculty and students: Why did you choose BUSPH?

I didn’t know whether I wanted to be an epi person or a biostats person, and BUSPH gave me that combination that few other schools did. I had the privilege of actually visiting the States six months before I even started my application. So I went and visited Columbia, I visited Johns Hopkins, I went to NYU, and I came to BUSPH. And as cliche as this sounds, the second I stepped onto our campus, I knew this was what I wanted. Talking to the faculty, talking to everyone here, I was like, I love it here. And I also had my partner living in Boston at the time, which made it a lot easier that I didn’t have to do an on-campus job my first semester. So Boston, it was.

You mentioned the challenge of being a clinician and then seeing where the upstream problems arise. How did that realization change your thinking about how best to serve people?

That’s basically my life’s goal, to answer that question. And I think public health and BU gave me an answer. I worked in oncology and saw people being diagnosed with cancers very early on, kids as young as 4 and 5, and I was 22 years old at the time. I think the one question that stuck out to me is, as a world, why are we not doing something to prevent these? Why are we having so many women with cervical cancer—it’s so prevalent and it’s a preventable cancer. So we’re doing something wrong in terms of not educating people on vaccinations, we’re not educating people on diets, about certain plastics and how they influence cancer prognosis. And also I think, we just lack a lot in terms of doing research for preventative medicine and integrative medicine and how we don’t have to be on opioids and NSAIDs, we can do so much. Long story short, I didn’t want people in the hospital. I wanted to do everything to keep them out of it.

What were some of the other challenges your discovered when starting the program?

It was very, very scary, very intimidating.

I’m not going to lie. I was not a data person. I couldn’t code, I couldn’t do any of the data stuff in research. But I think, again, huge credit to BUSPH—from my first quant class, they did everything in basic steps. And I felt like the more I was learning it, the more I started to love it. I think in a year and a half I can code in three languages. I really learned everything because of BUSPH, they didn’t expect you to have any sort of previous knowledge at all. They said, we will teach you whatever you need. And I think I needed that from a school because I was making a huge change. But I think after the first semester, I got a lot of confidence back that I could do it.

What are your plans after SPH?

I’m waiting on a job offer in cancer research and I’m moving to California, which I wanted to. My partner now works in the Bay Area and I’m potentially looking at a job there. I was very, very skeptical about applying for jobs in the current market, especially as an international student. It’s been a struggle, right? Not because I don’t think we are going to get jobs, it’s just the time period. There have been a lot of funding cuts and we are just trying to navigate this whole extremely unpredictable environment. And with international students, after we graduate, we have 90 days in the country. If we don’t have a job, we go back home.

But I think my background as a clinician is my biggest advantage because they want someone to know what chemotherapy drugs already do for you to be able to research that. They don’t want to train anyone to do that right now. So I think just in terms of the jobs that I applied to, I was very intentional to tell them that, ‘Hey, I’m a clinician. I understand signs and symptoms. I understand the drugs that you’re using. I can do that as well as code for you and do the data analysis bit.’

And I think more than anything, what can help is the way BUSPH approaches education. They’re like, ‘I know you can study this from a textbook. I don’t want to give you that in class.’ They taught us very important things in terms of outbreak communication, how do you communicate when there’s a problem. No textbook is going to teach you that. They also taught us the disparities that we will see in terms of the vulnerable populations that we’re going to be dealing with. I think I learned much in the way of cultural education, which I’m really grateful for. So I think I take that forward.

So it sounds like your experience here was not just rooted in what you learned from the books, it also benefitted from the way that your instructors taught about the health landscape. Did you have a similar learning experience during your practicum?

Yes, I was very, very lucky. I did it in Fenway Health and worked on HIV studies, and it was really life-changing. I was able to transcribe interviews that happened between participants and interviewers. It was a lot to do with the LGBTQIA+ community and what they feel about access to healthcare. It was so intimate for me to understand what they face and how healthcare providers could make a difference. These are things that you will never understand unless you walk their walk. Unless you put yourself in their shoes, you’re not going to understand what they face. And I think that’s the most important thing. I loved my practicum.

What advice do you have for peers who might be coming into the program about getting used to both the program and to Boston?

I think my biggest advice would be to do what makes you uncomfortable. Put yourself out there because the door’s not going to open until you knock.

BU has every resource, but you need to want to seek out that resource. I think for me, and I say this in my speech, is that growing up in India, I was taught silence. I was taught not to speak up. Coming to BU and having them really welcome my voice every time I spoke was amazing.