News

Arushi Avachat, who plans to graduate in June with degrees in English and political science and a South Asian studies minor, is the latest UCLA student to win the prestigious Marshall Scholarship.

This is the third consecutive year in which a UCLA student or alumnus has received the highly competitive scholarship, which funds up to three years of graduate study in the United Kingdom for U.S. undergraduates or recent graduates.

Avachat is one of 51 winners chosen from among more than 1,000 applicants for 2024. She plans to pursue master’s degrees in English and American studies, and in global and imperial history at the University of Oxford.

The Pleasanton, California, native said she is looking forward to the experience, partly because she hopes to use England as a home base for travels to other parts of Europe, and partly because of one of her own literary inspirations.

“I’m an enormous Jane Austen fan,” she said. “So I’ll be excited for every Austen landscape I can go to in the U.K., and I’m hoping to see every setting from the 2005 ‘Pride and Prejudice’ movie.”

The new year is shaping up to be an exciting one for Avachat. Beyond her graduation and the Marshall award, her debut novel, “Arya Khanna’s Bollywood Moment,” is scheduled to be published in January by Macmillan.

She drafted the manuscript for the novel during her first year at UCLA. “As a COVID freshman, writing my novel was often a meaningful escape from the stress and uncertainties of that time,” Avachat said in a 2022 UCLA College Magazine article.

Read the full article.

Photo credit: Haven Hunt