How the challenges of childhood influenced Sakshi Venkatraman to be a journalist.
As a child growing up in Dallas, Sakshi Venkartraman always pictured herself moving far away from the town where she was buffeted by one hardship after another.
At school, she endured bullying from classmates because of her South Asian heritage. Her family struggled financially, and a significant elder in her family was abusive towards them. Her mother, hoping to bring a sense of normalcy to her daughter’s life, encouraged Venkatraman to write every day.
Soon, writing became a refuge and a lifeline.
“I loved creating worlds on paper that I could escape to,” said Venkatraman, who graduated from New York University’s College of Arts and Science in 2021. “That’s how I fell in love with writing, and I have never looked back since.”
She has spent the past seven years building a career in journalism, working at first as an intern at several publications in Texas and then as editor-in-chief of NYU’s Washington Square News. Today, Venkatraman is a full-time reporter at NBC News, where she reports on South Asian Americans.
But she has never forgotten the challenges she encountered as a child. Those experiences left her determined to succeed and to tell the stories of people who don’t have a voice.
“All my experiences, may it be trauma in my childhood or facing racism while growing up, have drawn me to report on minority communities, non-English speaking immigrants, and the sections of society largely ignored by traditional media,” Venkatraman said in a Zoom interview interrupted by her cat’s curious nudges. “My heart is drawn to them.”
She set her mind on becoming a journalist in high school, where she wrote fiery editorials, voicing support for gay rights and against the Confederate flag, in the student newspaper.
Her mother, Jyoti Masurekar, describes her as a go-getter with a great work ethic.
“She would finish edits by 2:00 am, sometimes 3:00 am, when working at Washington Square News while also having an on-campus job plus her school work,” she said. “She’s very determined and will go places.”
Venkatraman brought that energy and determination to her work at NYU’s Washington Square News, according to Alejandro Villa Vasquez, her longtime friend who also worked at NYU’s student newspaper.
“We once had students at NYU Stern complaining about Islamophobic slurs being used against them and the administration doing nothing to stop it,’’ he recalled. “So, Sakshi reported and wrote about it with such grit that the Stern administration issued a four page letter issuing an apology and pledged 300,000 dollars over three years for diversity initiatives. The letter vowed to establish an undergraduate advisory board on inclusion and diversity, which would include members from various immigrant student-led groups.”
Venkatraman said that she benefited enormously from having access to expensive equipment and training available at NYU.
“Journalism as an industry is inaccessible to a lot of kids from low-income families due to the expensive multimedia setup,” she said. “But at NYU, I could just rent any equipment I wanted and learn marketable skills to get a good job.”
In 2020, Venkatraman got an internship at NBC News as a general assignment reporter. She soon found herself gravitating towards reporting for the outlet’s Asian America page. “Nobody else was writing about South Asians,” she said. It was a niche that she was eager to fill.
In 2022, NBC hired her full time, and she now focuses on covering issues involving South Asian Americans, including the heartbreaking story of an Asian Indian family that froze to death while trying to cross into America through the Canadian border.
If Venkatraman is not in the newsroom, she’s either cooking, trying out pottery, or painting. She has trivia night with friends every Tuesday and hopes to write a memoir one day.
“I’ve always found a way to reclaim my joy amidst everything,” she said as she described the challenges she has surmounted. “And I think anyone who struggles can do that.”
