UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Srishti Ponnala, who graduated from Penn State with an undergraduate degree in global and international studies in 2021, is pursuing her juris doctorate at the University of Wisconsin Law School in the hopes of becoming a business/corporate attorney — a journey made possible, she said, because of her experience as an undergraduate student in the Penn State College of the Liberal Arts.
While at Penn State, the Austin, Texas, native was heavily involved in World in Conversation — an initiative launched at the University in 2002 to spark meaningful dialogue on public diplomacy and advance human capacity to address and resolve societal issues. Ponnala first learned of the program during the fall of her second year while taking SOC 119N: Race, Ethnicity, and Culture, a course taught by Sam Richards, teaching professor of sociology and World in Conversation’s co-founder. Ponnala was selected as an undergraduate teaching assistant for the program. The role required her to learn facilitation skills and how to guide conversations using investigative dialogue — skills that also come in handy as a law student.
“Facilitation is similar to arbitration in that they both use the Socratic method," she said. "The way to approach dialogue is like taking all sides but no side [to see] all viewpoints. This is something I now apply in law school. You don’t take what things are at face value — you really dig into a topic with a childlike curiosity.”
Ponnala became an advanced dialogue assistant the following year, and she began to participate in dialogues with larger groups of students involving organizations outside of Penn State, such as the United Nations Development Programme. That allowed her to accumulate enough facilitation hours to become a veteran advanced facilitator and a dialogue initiator, where she took on the responsibility of reviewing past dialogues and giving feedback to facilitators.
“My favorite memory is doing a day of dialogue on MLK Day,” she said. “Outside of regularly facilitated dialogues, we got to do a whole day worth of dialogues with students, faculty, staff and State College community members focused on ideas of race, politics, equality and equity. I got to talk with many different types of people. Hearing their niche understanding of the topics and seeing them engage with one another highlighted how they were very similar but also different.”
During her final year, Ponnala joined World in Conversation’s partitioner’s team, where she joined World in Conversation co-founder Laurie Mulvey and others to discuss patterns and trends in dialogues and what the future of the program should look like. That experience provided greater insight on how to best use technology to bridge collaboration and understanding among different communities.
Ponnala was also a Paterno Fellow and Schreyer Scholar. Her honors thesis focused on international law; specifically, the 2012 ratification of the Crime of Aggression to the International Criminal Court through the lens of the Indian-Pakistani conflict.
It was also during that time that her thesis adviser, Howie Smith, Penn State teaching professor of criminology and a University of Wisconsin Law School alumnus, helped put law school, and the University of Wisconsin in particular, on her radar.
“I would not be here without Howie,” Ponnala said. “I first met him when I attended a Penn State study abroad program about human rights and international law where he was my instructor. Since then, he has been a big source of support.”
Ponnala has already taken on student leadership roles at Wisconsin, something that is atypical for second-year law students. She currently is co-president of the Asian Pacific Islander Desi American Law Student Association and vice president of the Wisconsin International Law Society — organizations that provide opportunities for law students to connect, find support and learn more about real-life applications of law.
“We make a space for law students who are very busy to come together to meet with each other and with faculty to speak about initiatives at the school or applications of law in real life,” she said.
Ponnala said she looks forward to completing law school and eventually entering business/corporate law. Her plans this summer include working as a student associate with the University of Wisconsin Law and Entrepreneurship Clinic, where she will work on intellectual property legal matters concerning entrepreneurs and businesses, including filing trademark and patent applications, performing freedom-to-operate analyses, and writing proprietary and open-source licenses for clients.