Urvi Sharma

I would attribute my success to my parents, because coming from an Indian background, getting married at a certain age is the limit, and there are all these kind of taboos. My parents stood strong. They didn't care about the society. When I changed so many fields, I said no to my marriage, I came here, so I guess all these decisions, if they wouldn't have supported me, I don't think so I would have been able to have done it alone. Coming from an Indian background where women are expected to follow certain cultural norms, my parents gave me the freedom and support to pursue my education and career, even when it meant going against societal expectations.

My best career advice that I got from a mentor was, fail fast. Failing and failure is inevitable, and it's a process to your growth, so fail fast so you know that what you need to do next. That's one thing that always kept me going, that never let me give up. Even if I failed, I knew, if I fail, let's just fail fast, and just go forward and do the thing again. This advice really works with me because it helped me understand that failure is part of success, and the key is to learn quickly and move forward.

If somebody is entering psychology or business, I would want to say is dig deeper. You don't need to feel that what I'm doing has already been done. You can always create a value, you can always contribute to the same field, you can always contribute, and if you dig deeper, you're always gonna find a better way of doing things. When I came into this field, I was so scared, because whatever topic I used to pick, it was already discussed, researched, and talked about. But now that I've been going deeper, I just feel like those are all superficial things, but real work, very less people actually do the real work. So dig deeper, just don't give in. Go forward with it.

There were two challenges that I felt, even in India and coming here too. One is that having such an educated background, and I'm still young, and when I talk to someone, they won't give me that much of a value what I carry for my first impression. That's one thing which has been challenging, and I'm still trying to find my rhythm, still trying to find what my first impression should look like. The second thing that was a big challenge for me is being a woman. When you actually think of not settling in and doing something which asks for you to make decisions which is gonna be hard for you emotionally, I feel like a lot of women back down because they don't have either enough support or either enough examples. So I feel like I do want to create an example in this society so that women can go forward. These are the two challenges - understanding how to carry all that I'm gaining, because I'm getting so much education or so much practices, I still don't know how to present myself. I guess that's because of where I come from, I have not been conditioned in that way, I'm not sure. But I'm still figuring out, and I feel like this is one of the challenges that a lot of women feel in their field.

The most important values I have are professionalism, clear communication, and mutual respect. I do respect a lot of professionalism. I maintain a lot of professionalism when I'm talking to another person in a workplace, and I expect the same. I do expect clear communication. That is one thing that I'm too much onto, that no matter how much try I give, I need to make sure that my communication is very clear, and that the other person is actually able to understand. And I would feel like mutual respect is very important, no matter if it's your personal relationship or your professional relationship. To start any relationship, I feel mutual respect is the one thing that needs to be there.