In every movie or TV show portraying an American high school, I am always surprised at how categorical everything seems to be: either you’re cool or you’re not, a jock or a math geek but never both, and if you’re smart you will be socially awkward. It is hard to know if this is exaggerated purely for dramatic effect, but the truth remains that I am incredibly grateful for Ecolint, a school where students are engaged and can define themselves however they see fit, even if it means being captain of the basketball team and representing the school at math competitions (in case you’re wondering, that does not describe me – I played the cello and rode horses).
That is probably why I loved school so much, because I myself have never been very good at fitting into predefined categories and somehow that meant that at Ecolint, I fit right in. Born and raised in Geneva, my background is Bolivian and Iranian, so at home we often switched between English and French (and sometimes Spanish) within a same sentence. Some think that is a way to show off; the truth is it was all about “the path of least resistance” and my brain going with the first words available to express what I wanted to say. Laziness posing as something shiny.
After LGB, I got a degree in Biology from UPenn and have since worked primarily in communications, events, and project management, often in the area of health – for the International Labor Organization (ILO) and the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, and more recently The Vitality Group in New York. Along the way, I got an Executive MBA in Healthcare Management.
In-between contracts with the ILO, I spent three years in Bolivia, volunteering for the Red Cross and the La Paz Children’s Hospital – which I visited for the first time on one of Ecolint’s community service trips. Then I started my own web design and communications company. As my grandfather put it, in Bolivia “what is possible is impossible, and what is impossible is possible” – part of why I felt so alive there. Where else could I pursue my passion for horse-riding and end up a national dressage champion almost by mistake?
Today, I have once again embarked on an adventure that does not quite fit into “the norm”. After a yearlong around-the-world honeymoon where we spent a lot of time volunteering on farms as well as being tourists and enjoying the great outdoors, my husband and I are relocating to Portugal to become farmers.
Well, sort of. I don’t mean farmers in the classic sense, as we do not plan to grow fields of produce to sell at the market. Our vision is one of a home where we can grow vegetables, collect fresh eggs from our chickens, and share our lives with a few animals, following principles of permaculture (if you’ve never heard of that, look it up – it’s fascinating). We also want to build a few cabins to rent out and develop an eco-tourism business.
It all comes back to some of the values I picked up at Ecolint. They translate into the desire to make the world a better place; the confidence that I can excel at anything I set my mind to (especially because my mind would never pick financial modeling for a bank as a goal); and hoping to inspire others.
The best advice I can give to anyone interested in listening (or reading, as the case may be) is this: follow your passions, trust your intuition – but do your research, and do not aspire to “be normal” because no one actually knows what that means. As someone smart once said, “be yourself, because everyone else is already taken.”
Shahnaz Radjy graduated from LGB in 2000. She writes about her travels and adventures on www.farmaventure.com and you can also find her on Medium, Twitter, and Instagram. If you want to get in touch, her email is sradjy@gmail.com. She has also recently joined the new platform Ecolint Connect.
