USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research’s newest staff member may have just graduated from USC, but she is already a very familiar face around USC Shoah Foundation.

Shefali Deshpande has just completed her second week at the Center for Advanced Genocide Research, where she is assisting director Wolf Gruner with the Center’s upcoming events and administration. She graduated with a bachelor’s in political science and musical theater in May 2015.

Deshpande first became involved with USC Shoah Foundation in the summer of 2014, when she took the Problems Without Passports course Remembering Rwanda: Memory, Testimony and Living Together taught by Amy M. Carnes, USC Shoah Foundation associate director of education – evaluation and scholarship. The course included a two-week trip to Rwanda to study the country’s socio-political reconstruction after genocide.

She said she was inspired to take the course after taking another political science course about terrorism and genocide. After learning about the horrors that happened there, Deshpande said it was eye-opening to travel to Rwanda and see how the country has evolved since the genocide.

“I wasn’t quite prepared for how emotionally overwhelmed I would be. It was very real," Deshpande said. "You’re standing at the graves and you can see the dimensions of the mass graves and the individual graves. You read about it in a book but then you can quantify it when you’re standing in all these different places. It was so different than what you read about; it was jarring. Those got me a little more prepared for hearing people’s firsthand views."

Following the trip, Deshpande joined several other students in the class and became an intern at USC Shoah Foundation, working specifically with Gruner and the Center for Advanced Genocide Research.

When a staff position opened up, Deshpande jumped at the chance to stay on at the Center. She said her goal is to be able to pursue political science as well as acting and musical theater – she was in several student productions at USC – and working at the Center allows her to do both.

“I wanted to continue working with the Shoah Foundation and doing things that I care about,” she said.

In just two weeks, Deshpande is already proud of her first major project: organizing the visiting lecture by Guatemalan Genocide scholar Victoria Sanford, which was featured on the front page of the Daily Trojan the next day. She’s also coordinating the upcoming four-month residency of 2015 Center Fellow Kiril Feferman and managing the applications that have been submitted for the Center’s 2016 international conference, “A ‘Conflict’? Genocide and Resistance in Guatemala.”

Deshpande said that during her time at the Center for Advanced Genocide Research, she is most looking forward to meeting the scholars and other fascinating visitors that will come through the doors.

“I think by the time I leave I will have liked to interact with as many people as possible, especially people who know more than I do,” Deshpande said. “We have so many visiting scholars and so many people who just drop by the center for the day, who have these huge cultural and political and sociological histories, and if I can learn even one thing from each of them, I will consider my position a success.”