July Alumni Spotlight: Madhura (Wheaton High School)

Madhura Phuyel is an alumna of Liberty’s Promise at Wheaton High School class of 2011. She has since gone on to get a bachelor’s degree with a double major in Business Management and Information Systems at Salisbury University and recently received her MBA with a concentration in real estate finance from Saint Joseph’s University.

We talked to her recently and here’s what she had to say:

I moved to the U.S. in 2008 from a refugee camp in Nepal. When I first arrived, I didn’t speak any English, so it was very frustrating and scary to say the least. Not knowing the culture or language or anything else was rough. Being a high school student is already tough, it’s hard making new friends, on top of that, I didn’t know the language or culture or how the system worked. Being from a refugee camp was an added challenge because I had never seen anything outside of the refugee camp before I moved to the U.S. But there were a lot of people along the way who helped me: teachers and Liberty’s Promise. I believe I started Liberty’s Promise in my sophomore year.

I was a couple of months old when my parents moved to the refugee camp from Bhutan. I was born in Bhutan and my parents were born in Bhutan. It’s a long story, but basically there was a war going on and the king was trying to do ethnic cleansing and my family was thrown out of the country. Even though we were actually ethnically Nepalese since my grandparents were Nepalese and moved to Bhutan, we became refugees in our own country. I had spent all my life in a refugee camp before moving to the U.S. I had never seen anyone or anything outside of a camp. I had never seen an English movie. I feel like someone should have prepared us before moving here. Everyone I knew was in a refugee camp. When I got to the U.S., everything was different than what I was used to. The food; I had never seen pizza or heard of pizza. I was a vegetarian all my life so I had never had meat, and I remember being at the school cafeteria with a friend and she would take the pepperoni off my pizza and would say “this is vegetarian now, you can eat it.” I didn’t know anything about Halloween when everyone else was excited about celebrating, and when festival time came for Diwali nothing was celebrated here. I know there are communities here who celebrate now, but we didn’t know any of those communities at the time, so we were always sad for the entire month that we couldn’t do anything to celebrate. When I think back, those days were the saddest days for us. I don’t think I can pinpoint one major thing that was the biggest shock, but everything was upside-down for a while when I first got here. I had never seen a debit card before, much less knew how to use one.

I was in high school in the U.S. for just three years because some credits transferred. It was very rough in the beginning. I was scared to talk to anyone, and there were always kids who would make fun of you for how you dressed or spoke. Just like other kids have gone through bullying, I went through bullying myself on top of everything else. All I could do was show up, do my homework, be on time to class, and be obedient and disciplined. Sophomore year was hard, but junior year came around and I started going to Liberty’s Promise a lot more often. I met a lot of other students like me and made a lot of friends. Liberty’s Promise was one of the best organizations for someone like me going through high school. I remember we took field trips to museums, to the White House, and to other places as well. This exposed me to a lot of new experiences and I thought it was a great learning opportunity.

Ms. Austin Morris, the program officer running the Liberty’s Promise program, was super helpful. She helped me apply for colleges and helped me apply for scholarships. The last semester of my junior year was very fun because I got this huge scholarship and it was in the news at school and then I started making more friends, too. Senior year was much easier because I knew I was going to college and I knew where. My money was already set up because I got these scholarships with the help of Liberty’s Promise. That was totally on Ms. Austin, she helped me over the summer when I’m sure she had things to do, but she would still pick me up from my home to drive me to places when I needed it. I remember telling Ms. Austin about how a kid was bullying me because I didn’t know how to use a computer. That was my sophomore year and then my senior year the same student was in my class and we were required to work as partners and we eventually became kind of friends.

I got a Nordstrom scholarship and Liberty’s Promise and another nonprofit, College Tracks, helped me with the application. I remember it was the summer and we had just moved to a new home and didn’t have the Internet yet, so I didn’t check my email for a long time. I went back to school and checked my email then and I had gotten the invitation for the interview so I asked someone about it and they said I had to go interview in person. I took a train to the interview and I was so nervous. Everyone around me seemed so confident and spoke English so well and knew what they were going to say. They were all prepared and I was not. I knew I was going to lose it because there was no way I was going to get this big scholarship with all those smart people who were all there with their parents. I came alone on the train, so I was really nervous. But I was able to get the scholarship and 12 people were selected out of 232 who applied and they featured me in the news for it.

Another scholarship I got was the Esperanza Scholarship and that was also in the summer before my senior year. Ms. Austin helped me to apply for the scholarship before the end of the school year and then she picked me up at my home because we had moved to a different place with no public transportation access and she dropped me off at the Esperanza interview center. With those two scholarships and the financial aid and scholarships offered by Salisbury University, I was able to pay for my whole undergraduate degree without any loans.

My undergraduate studies were not as fun as high school. Once I started making friends, the academic part of high school wasn’t very hard for me. But after I graduated, I didn’t know what to expect in college. I didn’t have a mentor then, and I moved away to Salisbury and I didn’t keep in touch with Liberty’s Promise or any other friends. I was the first one in my family to go to college and I didn’t know what to do and I didn’t make good friends who could help me out. I started to pick up bad habits and made mistakes by not listening to myself and my values and caving into peer pressure. I needed some guidance, which I didn’t have, but I was able to get some help from teachers and meet some mentors through programs at the college before things got too bad. I was able to turn things around and made the dean’s list my final semester after changing majors and doing a double major, which was another challenge. It was rough because I know my parents had high expectations for me and my siblings were looking up to me, but I just didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know what was needed to be successful in college, which made my first two years very difficult. I also worked campus jobs during college to help pay for extra expenses.

I graduated college in 2016 and started a job at PNC Bank as a part time teller and then was moved to full time after a few months. After six months I became a sales representative, so I was at the bank for about a year and a half. After that I started as a financial analyst in a real estate company in the servicing department where we service the loans and help borrowers. After that I worked at M&T Bank for about a year and did almost the same thing as a servicing manager while finishing my MBA. Now I work at my current job in real estate with a flexible work schedule and it’s been really great so far.