Campus Ambassador

Varsha Kommireddi is becoming her own hero

By Charlie Reed

Varsha Kommireddi began her senior year at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga with a resume that already was stellar.

Dean’s list all eight semesters. John C. Stophel Scholar in the Gary W. Rollins College of Business. Dean’s Student Advisory Council executive. Peer mentor. UTC tour guide. Student worker. Active sorority sister in Sigma Kappa.

A “campus ambassador for UTC” is how she puts it on her LinkedIn profile.

On to graduate school for an MBA was supposed to be the next step after executing her plan to graduate with a bachelor’s degree in business in May, but feelings of doubt started creeping into Kommireddi’s plan. The self-reflection got hard, and her heart sank.

“Do I really want to spend two years in grad school?” she asks herself. “Or am I doing what I’ve always done, which is living life on a to-do list basis?”

She needed some direction, some inspiration, some advice.

Kommireddi talked with a few UTC advisors and some friends, then went to see her dad—her “baba,” as she calls him their native tongue Telugu, spoken mostly in southeastern India.

The oldest daughter of Narsing Kommireddi and Madhavi Balla, who moved to the U.S. in the early 1990s from Visakhapatnam, India, she was born in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee, just outside Nashville. She was raised in a group of tight-knit, Indian-American families where adult family friends are “aunties and uncles” and academic expectations are high among kids and parents.

An Ivy League education, then on to a career in engineering, medicine or law are considered the best in Indian culture, she says.

Her parents were steeped in this version of success but are open-minded and have come to celebrate their three children’s different strengths, too, she says.

“My generation of Indians, I guess, we’re changing stereotypes. We’re challenging the status quo. I chose business because I wanted to do what my dad did,” says Kommireddi, who sports a keychain with her father’s company logo on it.

He built a successful financial services company through Primerica and embodies “That typical, fresh-off-the-boat success story,” Kommireddi says. She was “raised in the company” but never asked why he chose that field. In her moment of existential woe, she finally did, and he said he was “building a legacy,” not just a business.

She tapped into her dad’s purpose and, in doing so, her own.

“To hear him say something that carried such significance, I was like, ‘I want that too,’” she says.

Her anxiety broke like a fever, and her vision of working toward a legacy became clear, even if her next move was still to be determined.

FEELING“SEEN, HEARD, LOVED”

Just a few weeks earlier, in the midst of her college-life crisis, an academic advisor urged Kommireddi to apply for the Tennessee Governor’s Management Fellowship.

A people-oriented business major, she had never considered working in the public sector; so along with applying to graduate school, she “just went for it.”

Kommireddi made it to the first round of interviews for the highly competitive fellowship, which puts recipients to work in management teams with some of the state’s most powerful government executives.

She made the second cut and, by November, was named a finalist. Fellowship organizers put her up in the swanky Hermitage Hotel in downtown Nashville for the last trial.

She slayed the rapid-fire, question-and- answer sessions with her competitors— which included law students and young working professionals—and mingled with ease at the business-casual mixers with government leaders.

“I’m articulate and quick-thinking, but you know, you’re interviewing with people who are choosing five candidates to represent the state, so it was cutthroat, the real deal,” she says.

“I was like, ‘I’m going to go in there. I’m going to give it a shot,’” she says. “The further I got in the interview process, the more I wanted it.”

Despite the fierce competition, she stayed true to her motto: “Do and be better; and make people feel seen, heard and loved.”

Her approach obviously worked, and she found out she won a place in the fellowship program in December, just as the first semester of her last year of college was coming to an end.

“It’s a great honor and I’m slowly starting to realize just exactly what I’m going to be able to do and who I’ll be able to work with,” Kommireddi says.

“At the end of the day, I wanted to continue serving. Now I just get to do that on a much larger scale for my state and its people,” she says.

Her family back home in Mt. Juliet and her community of friends, professors, advisors, sorority sisters and others here at UTC have helped her become who she is today, she says.

But her hero?

“My honest answer would be the woman I’m becoming,” she says.