By Fiona Dosanjh, E&I summer intern
What happens when the first draft of your senior thesis is due in a month and you’ve already exhausted three ideas? This was the question Ankita Suri ’25 had to answer this past semester as the deadline for her Film & Media Studies thesis was speeding toward her. Ironically, the answer would come to her two days before spring break with a mere doom scroll.
But the full story of Suri’s project dates back to her sophomore year. Eager to build the creative platforms she wished she could engage with, Suri built two ventures alongside peers while juggling a full class load and extracurricular commitments. One of which was Muse, a student art collective she co-founded through TIA to support artists with selling work. While Suri greatly enjoyed every experience she had, she quickly found herself burnt out. Like most young entrepreneurs, Suri sought help from “thought leaders” producing podcasts that seemed to understand her psyche. She mentioned that the advice she consumed made her feel better in the moment, but “I didn’t realize [that my consumption] perpetuated an obsession with work and controlling every aspect of my life, including sleep, to perform better and allegedly feel better.” While she sees these aspects of wellness as crucial for good health, Suri suggested that “this style of advice made me feel overwhelmed with this pressure to constantly optimize without any room for error, while turning mundane moments into crucial steps for productivity.”
She realized that a major problem with these podcasts is that they try to fit a lifetime of experiences into a single episode: “It’s a random man telling me how to move on from failure in 8 minutes, half of which are advertisements for wellness goods I allegedly need to be successful,” she said. “Don’t get me wrong, some of the advice was helpful, but it felt so easy to forget that something that worked for one person won’t always work for me.”
Cut to Suri’s senior year. She had just completed her thesis in Peace & Conflict Studies and was now tasked with engaging her creativity in a Film & Media Studies capstone. She began with a focus on meme culture and belonging. But, she quickly shifted to personal style and identity—a natural extension of her work with 13 Degrees, the student magazine she founded to spotlight self-expression. Though she felt set on her topic, her professors encouraged her to think outside the box with this opportunity. Suri then decided to dive into the theory she found in Case-Geyer’s stacks. Book after book led her to question how practices of authenticity — especially online — intersect with personal branding. Suri then switched her topic a third time to the intersection of authenticity and digital life. She decided to create a podcast because it felt like a more authentic avenue for discussing the topic, rather than writing a research paper. Everything seemed on track until Suri conducted her preliminary interviews. She quickly realized that everyone struggled to explain their own practices of authenticity, and suddenly, “I felt I had no idea what I was talking about, because I had no idea if I was even being my authentic self,” she said.
Realizing she had a month before her deadline, and no clear direction with her project, Suri—in true Gen Z fashion—sought comfort in her social media feed. As she swiped from one item to the next, she came upon a video by Dan Toomey, comedian and host of Morning Brew’s “Good Work.”
“My wheels just started spinning because I was like, ‘Oh my gosh—what if I dove into comedy?’” she said. After countless voice memos to record ideas, frantic phone calls to friends for feedback, and recognition of her gut instinct to create, Suri realized that “I was so focused on telling everyone else’s stories, when I should really just tell my own.”
When asked why she decided to make her project satirical, Suri mentioned that she wanted to highlight the problem without directly stating it, and she wanted to encourage viewers to reflect on their own experiences. “Everyone has their individual experience with these systems, and comedy allows me to speak to this without pushing my opinions onto someone else. If I can encourage a reaction, I’ve done part of the job, ... plus the act of laughter is quite literally healing because it releases endorphins that can revitalize your body just as a workout might,” she said.
Her project gained momentum after meeting with Adam Samuel Goldman ’94 during . “The biggest piece of advice that I got was to trust my creative urge and stop calculating. ... He was like: ‘Why don’t you just make a whole world?’ ... ‘Why don’t you write a fake book?’” she said. So, she thought: “What if I used the podcast to promote this book and make a whole rabbit hole, where to get the advice from the podcast, you have to buy the book?” She ended up making , all part of the alluring but never attainable “Anki’s Word.” Each episode of the podcast has a different theme—direct-to-founder, direct-to-funder, and direct-to-follower—and offers deliberately unhelpful advice. The book promises to share the story of the uber-successful “Anki Suri,” and the website is intentionally difficult to navigate and full of jargon. In spring 2025, the project was installed on the second floor of Bernstein, where visitors could interact with the content through iPads and headsets mounted on the wall. Graphics throughout the space shared fake “inspirational” messages from Suri’s content.
When reflecting on her experience, from her ventures to her thesis, Suri mentioned that “Sometimes the answer isn’t always moving fast and breaking things to constantly iterate and strengthen your project, but taking a break ... maybe even slamming the brakes—fast—to genuinely move things on your terms.”
Suri hopes that her project and story behind her work reflect the importance of fulfillment, rather than control and success. “Within entrepreneurship, it’s easy to lose sight of yourself as your life begins to revolve entirely around your work. The drive to predict outcomes and stay in control often becomes a marker of success. In reality, there is so much you cannot predict, much like the crucial pivots and failures every enterprising creator faces.” Suri believes fulfillment should be “part of the entrepreneurial goal precisely because it demands intentionality and a willingness to look inward. Success, by contrast, is often shaped by external pressures—titles, validation, and comparisons that distort its meaning.” For Suri, genuine fulfillment grows from consistency and joy rather than control or metrics. It was this exact realization that led her down this path of creation and self-discovery with her thesis, and ultimately, a few steps closer to fulfillment with her entrepreneurial journey.
Suri was a participant in the TIA Incubator, having co-founded Muse alongside Avery Brundige ’25. Suri also served as the founder and editor-in-chief of 13 Degrees magazine, and is currently a John A. Golden ’66 Fellow.