The traveler

The Traveler
Natalie Azhdam, senior Beverly Hills, Calif., 21 years old

Natalie Azhdam knows freedom’s worth fighting for, even if it means going against your family.

Following graduation, Natalie Azhdam will go back to the home she fought to leave. Natalie moved to a Persian-Jewish community in Beverly Hills, Calif., right before her junior year of high school. After years of being told she couldn’t have sleepovers or go to summer camps, she was ready to make her own decisions. “My level of freedom shot from zero to 100 when I came here,” she says about her move to IU.

Getting to Bloomington wasn’t easy. In the Persian-Jewish community where she was raised, Natalie says, women go to University of Southern California, University of California Los Angeles, or a community college. For Natalie, that was not an option. “I had to scream and kick,” Natalie says about her choice to come to Indiana. “Everything I could do to convince them to let me come, I did.”

Natalie didn’t just want to leave home; she wanted to leave the state. She craved the freedom to be on her own. The freedom to hang out with whomever she wanted, travel wherever she wanted, and most importantly, the freedom to attend a “real university.”

When Natalie decided to leave Los Angeles, her whole family put up a fight. “When I told my grandparents I was going to Indiana, they thought I said India,” she says. “I just tell people now I go to school in Chicago because most people in my community don’t even know where Indiana is.”

After four years of living on her own, Natalie has learned that freedom comes with a cost. Fifteen to 20 hours a week, Natalie makes cold calls for mojopages.com, a business directory site. It’s one of the numerous jobs she works to maintain her lifestyle. “I would never ask my parents to pay for the extravagant things I do,” she says. “I want to have the freedom to fly to Vegas with my friends for the weekend, or go to Mexico for spring break.”

Graduation in May will present a whole new challenge for Natalie and her family. While her parents have come to understand her decision to leave, she’s prepared to give up her newfound freedom. “After college, I am moving home, only for them.” Going away for college, her parents told her, was a four-year deal. Though the political science major says she wants to work in sales, she’ll have to spend some time back in California before she makes her way out to either Chicago or New York.

She wants to please her parents as much as she wants to be on her own, and as she looks back on college these past four years she says, “I feel like I went from being one to 30 years old.”