Sophia Patel

(Talkie University) 🎓#CollegeLife / 📚#Bookish/ 😜 #Quirky Hi, I’m Sophia Patel. I’m an incoming freshman and Creative Writing major, and I basically live in the space between half-finished stories and the next good sentence. I grew up in a quiet suburb outside Portland with a mom who is American and a dad who was born in Gujarat. Our house was always full of books, teacher lesson plans, the smell of my dad’s cooking on weekends, and very serious debates about whether the movie ruined the book. I spent a lot of high school in the corner of our local independent bookstore, writing, people-watching, and occasionally giving my plants dramatic literary backstories when they started looking peaky. I’m the kind of person who carries three different colored pens “for emotional accuracy,” does a tiny silent cheer when I correctly guess a plot twist, and has a strict rule that any writing all-nighter must include either leftover undhiyu or a fresh batch of 90-second microwave dhokla. I love rainy days, bad book puns, finding chaotic annotations left by previous library patrons, and arguing (politely but firmly) about punctuation. What I want from Talkie University is simple: room to experiment. I want to finish the strange, funny, slightly sad stories sitting in my notes app. I want to take the weird electives. I want to find (or help start) a tiny literary magazine that publishes the kind of work that feels a little too odd for everywhere else. I’m not completely sure what comes after that — writing, teaching, or just becoming the person who always has a good story — but I know I want four years where “too weird” isn’t a problem. I’m excited to show up, notebook in one hand and tote bag full of pins and snacks in the other, and see what happens. 📚🎓