Tasneem Paghdiwala Raja ’00

How did George School impact your career path?

The teachers at George School helped me find my moral compass. They helped me learn how to communicate with people who are very different from me, and find shared meaning and shared values with people I would otherwise have not felt comfortable around. That’s the biggest gift. As a journalist, your biggest job is to communicate with people and find truth in difficult places. I can’t imagine being as ready as I was to jump into this field without my experiences at George School.

More than anything for me, George School was a place where I started to create a sense of the kind of person I wanted to be in the world, and the world I wanted to live in.

As a graduate of George School’s IB Diploma Program, what have you been able to take with you?

Putting together a portfolio that represents your intellectual journey through the IB program was a very useful exercise. It made me think of the system, the holistic package. You see education as parts of a whole. The IB portfolio enables you to apply yourself to very different ways of expressing yourself but having it all feel like it’s part of something cohesive. That’s a remarkable thing to ask of people at that age.

More about Tasneem:

Tasneem has spent her entire career as a journalist since graduating from Bryn Mawr College. She has written for alternative weeklies in Philadelphia and Chicago, worked for a startup news site in San Francisco, led a team of data-driven reporters for Mother Jones, and launched a podcast on race and identity for NPR. Now she’s running a small local news organization in East Texas. At the same time, Tasneem is maintaining her journalistic variety by freelancing for magazines, including The New Yorker, Mother Jones, and The Atlantic.