A 12-year-old immigrant in Raleigh, North Carolina argued in a school administrator’s office against being sent back to the eighth grade. Because academic calendars between India and the United States did not align, the school initially planned to make him repeat the year, but he presented transcripts and won, entering ninth grade in spring 2016. The same determination later led him to scrap a mobile app codebase and rebuild it from scratch as an early engineering hire at a $15 million startup. He arrived in the United States on parole status after months of immigration paperwork, learning local English by immersion while carrying ongoing uncertainty about whether his family’s status could be revoked. At UNC Charlotte, financial aid systems were structured for citizens and permanent residents, pushing him toward meme coins, sports betting, volatile cryptocurrencies, and wagers.
"He was 12 years old. He had been in the country for a matter of weeks. And he was arguing, with the composure of someone twice his age, that he should not be sent back to the eighth grade."
"The academic calendars of India and the United States did not line up cleanly, and the path of least administrative resistance was to make him repeat the year he had just finished. Chunduri presented his transcripts. He made his case. He won. By the time he walked into his first American classroom, in the spring of 2016, he was a ninth grader."
"Chunduri came to the United States on parole status, and his family had spent months threading the bureaucratic needle of American immigration. He learned the cadence of Southern American English the way immigrants tend to: by watching, listening, absorbing. The slang of a Research Triangle public school bore no resemblance to anything he had known in Hyderabad."
"So Chunduri turned to meme coins. He turned to sports betting. He traded volatile cryptocurrencies and placed wager"
Read at The Village Voice
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