Karma is excited to join the All-In Milwaukee team as a Scholar Advisor at UW-Madison. She was born and raised in a Tibetan refugee camp in Nepal before immigrating to Madison, Wisconsin. Her experience as a first-generation immigrant and college graduate informs her passion for helping AIM scholars meet their major and professional goals. Before joining All-In, she was a Precollege Advisor for the PEOPLE Program, a premier college pipeline program for limited-income and BIPOC students in Madison and Milwaukee. Specifically, she supported PEOPLE pre-college scholars from the Ronald Reagan College Preparatory High School by facilitating an academic readiness curriculum and helping lead summer residential learning at the UW-Madison campus.
As an alum of the PEOPLE Program, the Ronald E. McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program, and the Center for Academic Excellence (CAE) at UW-Madison, Karma understands the value of providing students with early exposure to college and mentorship from programs that target underrepresented students in higher education. She loves learning about her students’ motivation to attend college, offering transparency about her challenges and accomplishments in completing college and graduate school, and helping them pursue careers that align with their identity and interests.
Outside of advising, Karma is a researcher and writer. She received her B.A. in History and History of Science, Medicine, and Technology and her M.A. and Ph.D. in History from UW-Madison. Her work is focused on contextualizing U.S.-Tibet relations and the growth of exile politics in the Tibetan diaspora. She has been recognized for her research by the Fulbright Fellowship, the Institute for Research in the Humanities, the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, the Department of History at UW-Madison, and the UW-Madison Graduate School.