Despite having many ups and downs in her professional journey, Dr. Garima never gave up and always kept moving forward. She urges students to be creative and imaginative to be successful in the field of mass media and journalism.

Dr. Garima Shrivastava has been working as an Academic Consultant at Haridev Joshi University of Journalism and Mass Communication in Jaipur for a year now. After working in the field of production in radio and television for a couple of years, she plunged into the field of education. Now it has been more than twenty years that she is associated with the teaching profession in the Journalism and Mass Communication field.

Remembering her childhood, Garima says that her father was an RAS officer who inculcated in her a habit of reading books everyday. She also had a flair for writing  so she used to write poems and stories. She feels that her reading and writing habits helped her in moving far ahead in her career.

Garima belongs to Bikaner but has lived in different cities of Rajasthan like Udaipur, Ajmer, Rajsamand, Nagaur, etc. due to her father’s transferable job. She studied in different schools in various cities. She did BSC and MSC afterwards. But when it came to making a career in something, she did her PG Diploma in Video Editing and Filmmaking, keeping her creative pursuit in mind.

Garima says she started her professional journey as a Script Writer and Editor for many production houses. Soon, she started her own production house under her own banner and did several advertisements and other commercial projects. She also got associated with ETV Rajasthan as a Freelance Director. There she directed two TV serials and worked with them for two-and-a-half years, until she was diagnosed with cancer.

When asked about her role models, Garima says that she draws inspiration from APJ Abdul Kalam for his great sayings. She also considers her father as her role model for being her constant support and directing her on the path of living life in the right way. In addition, she takes inspiration from her ex-colleague, Raj Shah and her professor, NK Jain for their constant guidance and support.

Talking about her challenges, Garima says that the biggest challenge of her life was cancer, due to which she had to leave her job. She says that it was the worst phase of her life as she had to stay at home.

But to utilize that time, Garima used to read a lot. She also did translation work for some magazines and newspapers, which gave her the courage to fight the disease even more. Due to acquiring so much knowledge everyday, she then chose to shift her career from production to media education. Then she started her teaching profession with a small college. Eventually, she did her PhD to progress in her career. From there, she went to ICG College, where she worked for twelve long years and left as Head of the Department. She faced a lot of challenges in the teaching profession for it being a different field for her, but she handled everything well and coped up with the process.

While regretting her mistakes, Garima says that although she did all the courses to keep up with her profession, not doing them at the right time was her mistake, she feels. Apart from this, she feels that giving up on writing the research papers was her biggest mistake.

Sharing her COVID experience, Garima says that it was difficult to stay at home during the lockdown. But she spent her time taking online classes, cooking and reading.

If Garima had a Time Machine, she would like to go back in time and instead of pursuing MSC, she would have pursued some other course in which she wanted to make a career in.

In her spare time, Garima loves to read a lot. She enjoys traveling, watching birds, staying close to nature and doing photography sometimes.

Advising all the teachers, Garima says that you should not be partial with any student and treat everyone as the same. Further, she says that teaching is not only about delivering a lecture, instead, it is the duty of a teacher to build strong characters in their students and to prepare them to face the challenges of life.