EP 025: Interview Ankit Shah

Instructional Redesign Podcast

In this episode Cara sits down to converse with Ankit Shah, M.Ed who, as you will soon find out, is extremely passionate about diversity and inclusion (D&I). You can connect with Ankit on LinkedIn. Note: This conversation was recorded months before the major inflection point on race that has occurred across the United States. For another, more recent conversation between Cara and Ankit, check out the 7/1/20 TLDC Episode: How to Have Conversations About Race at Your Workplace. Connect with Cara & Joe Support the show Music created by Jahzzar. Show Transcript: Cara North 0:00Today, I am super excited to introduce to you all my friend Ankit Shah, who works here at The Ohio State University with me. And through our friendship, I have learned so much from him about diversity and inclusion. And I really felt that it was necessary for him to share some of his insights with you all. I really think you'll get a lot out of the today's episode. Ankit, thank you so much for being here. Ankit Shah 0:26Well, thank you for having me, Cara, Cara North 0:27of course. So can you share a little bit about your background? Ankit Shah 0:31Absolutely, absolutely. So I've been fortunate that in my entire career, I have been in education sector, starting with so I did my undergraduate and early child education. And after that I worked in all across k 12. So whether it's a public private charter, and I've also worked in Nevada, North Carolina, and Ohio. And so within those sectors, I worked with lots of underserved underrepresented populations in K 12. So I feel like that D&I has been part of my blood pretty much my entire career. And then around 2011, I went and got my first master's degree in higher education, administration, Student Affairs. And because the university that I went to had a really good program to help me learn about different institutional types, and so I do a lot of assistantships and internships across lots of different universities. And in that time, I've covered so many different diverse areas where there was student success and retention, academic advising, career coaching, research and assessment, those sorts of things. And after graduation, I did my first few years in career coaching, but even in my time and career coaching, I worked at two liberal arts. I worked at a community college and now I'm going to big 10 at The Ohio State. So in these populations that I got to serve, I serve veterans to residential to students with lots of different types of disabilities. You Name it. And in that time and indecent issues types, I literally look at the lens of P 20. And I've been fortunate that my career has allowed me to be all these different spaces. And currently I happen to be working at Ohio State as a career consultant in the alumni Career Management Office, where I served multi generational alumni across the age across the industry. And it's been amazing to see how now I've covered the entire lifespan. And the diversity equity inclusion has been part of my role the entire time and absolutely loving it. So knowing me, I'm a learner at strengths, I'm not done learning. And so I'm in my second graduate degree at Ohio State studying workforce development and education, but specializing in Adult Education and Human Resource Development. My current position has really taught me what it is to work with so many different types of people. And at the end, we're building relationships right? But all the different identities and especially having five generations in the workplace, how do we be your authentic self? And how do we bring who we are to work is driving me to be even more D&I space as I continue to do this work. Cara North 3:12I love it. And I have to say, I can totally vouch for again, everything that he said he is one of the most energetic people I think I've ever met. And I like to think I have a lot of energy. But he definitely is beating me in that department.