On the Record

Aarti Shahani MPP 2011

“I knew I wanted to be in a place with a high concentration of very smart people.”

Before Aarti Shahani MPP 2011 came to Harvard Kennedy School, she was a community organizer. Now, she speaks to an audience measuring in the tens of millions as a Silicon Valley correspondent for National Public Radio’s business desk.

Her work with immigrant prisoners didn’t start as a job. It was personal. When Shahani was a teenager, her father was arrested. He was running the family business, an electronics store in Manhattan. It turns out he sold watches and calculators to the wrong people—to members of a drug cartel. He received what was supposed to be an eight-month jail sentence. But, because her father was a green card holder and not a U.S. citizen, he faced a second punishment: deportation to India, a country he hadn’t lived in since the 1950s.

Then the terrorist attack of September 11 happened, and waves of immigrant New Yorkers landed into the same jails in which Shahani’s dad was held. Shahani found herself fighting her dad’s case and many others’ as well.

She founded an organization that helps immigrant families facing deportation. But after many years, she burned out. “I’d been spending so much time in prisons and jails, and I think I lost perspective. A friend of mine who’s far wiser than I said I should explore things outside of what I’m doing, to step away. And the Kennedy School was the first major step in this transition.”

She says the School seemed like a perfect place for someone who was smart, hungry, and needing to explore her options. “I wanted exposure to different types of careers. I had no idea what I was supposed to be next, but I knew I wanted to be in a place with a high concentration of very smart people.”

She came to the Kennedy School at age 30, which, she says, “is old for the MPP program. I knew what I didn’t want to do. I didn’t go to Harvard thinking I’m going to come out as a mainstream business reporter for NPR. But I stumbled into the Shorenstein Center [on Media, Politics and Public Policy], and I ended up meeting a lot of journalists. They enjoyed researching, meeting new people, and telling a story, and they value their independence. That felt like me.”

Today, she works on stories ranging from the Russian bots that influence public opinion in the United States to digital spying and divorce in the smartphone era. She is grateful to be at a news organization that gives its reporters the gift of time. “I’m not always expected to churn out one or two stories a day. Sometimes I get several days, even a few weeks for bigger features. My job is to find people who are fascinating and find out what about what they’re telling me that I can eke into the record.”