What happens when the first draft of your senior thesis is due in a month and you have already been through three different ideas, none of which satisfy you? This was the question Ankita Suri ’25 had to answer this past semester as the deadline for her Film and Media Studies senior thesis was speeding toward her. Ironically, the answer would come to her when she decided to take a step back from schoolwork during spring break.
To tell the story of Suri’s senior capstone project correctly, we must go back to her sophomore year. Suri was juggling different projects, a full class load, and extracurricular commitments. She sought help from podcasts promising to teach you how to be productive and stay on top of your to-do list.
“I burnt out so quickly, and then in the time that I was taking a break, I was listening to all of these podcasts that, honestly, I didn’t really realize perpetuated my obsession with work and commitment to the job,” she said.
Cut to Suri's senior year. She double-majored in peace and conflict studies and film and media studies, and it was time for her senior capstone for film. She started to work on a thesis “on culture and belonging online,” but quickly realized she wasn’t connected to the topic, so she decided to switch. She switched to a project on “personal style and expression,” but because it was related to a project she had done in the past (13 Degrees magazine), her professors told her that she needed “to do something that is not related to anything you’ve done before.” Time for yet another switch of topic.
To combat the frustration she was feeling about her thesis topic, she decided to dive into the theory. Through this, she began to think about the “daily practices of entrepreneurship and how these days, content creation has become a facet of entrepreneurship,” she said.
She began to consider what it means to have a personal brand online and how that connects to authenticity. Suri said she then “switched [my] topic a third time, to something talking about entrepreneurship and authenticity.” She decided to do a podcast that dove into the idea of authenticity.
“I had just done my preliminary interviews with a professor and a friend, and I realized no one knew what they were talking about with authenticity; and I had no idea what I was talking about, because I had no idea if I was even being my authentic self,” she said. She realized that her idea wasn’t going to work: “I had already made the work to start producing this new podcast idea only to realize that it had failed — and I had literally a month left.”
Faced with these three setbacks, Suri decided to take a break from schoolwork to clear her head. And, true to Gen Z, she decided to “doomscroll. As she swiped from one item to the next, she came upon a video by entrepreneur Dan Toomey, who makes comedic content.
“[My] wheels just started spinning because I was like, ‘Oh my gosh — what if I dove into comedy?’” she asked. “I was so focused on telling everyone else’s stories that I realized that I had no choice but to tell my own.”
Suri had finally found her idea, to make a satirical podcast at the intersection of entrepreneurship and authenticity, which critiqued self-help culture and entrepreneurship creators.
When asked why she decided to make her project satirical, she said, “I think part of the power of satire and comedy is it’s so accessible.” She wanted to point out the problem without blatantly stating it. She was off and running. “My process was, quite literally, listen to a podcast from, like, Dr. [Andrew] Huberman, and then write notes on the advice he’s giving, reference back to the theories I was working with, and then spin it into a joke.”
She realized that the problem with the self-help and entrepreneurship podcasts is that they try to fit a lifetime of experiences into a 15-minute episode and package their personal, life-long journey as attainable via a step-by-step plan. “It’s a random man who’s selling me his rags-to-riches story, which I’m sure he put in a lot of work behind the scenes,” she said, “but he’s telling me how to move on from failure in literally eight minutes.”
Her project picked up steam after Suri met with Adam Samuel Goldman ’94 during Arts, Creativity, and Innovation Weekend.
“The biggest piece of advice that I got was to just go and play in the sandbox. … He was like: ‘Why don’t you just make a whole world?’ ... ‘Why don’t you write a fake book?’” she said. So, she thought: “What if I used the podcast to promote this book and sort of make like a whole rabbit hole, where to actually get the advice from the podcast, you have to buy the book?”
She ended up making a website, a three-episode podcast, and a conceptualized book, all part of the alluring but never attainable “Anki’s Word.” Each episode of the podcast has a different theme — direct-to-founder, direct-to-funder, and direct-to-follower — and offers unhelpful advice; the book promises to share the story of the uber-successful “Anki Suri,” and the website is confusing and full of jargon. The website centers around the term “authepreneurship,” a combination of authenticity and entrepreneurship. Despite using the term frequently, she purposefully fails to define it.
Through the creation of “Anki’s World,” Suri has been able to creatively critique the self-help and entrepreneurship culture found online. She has shown that, while advice can certainly be found online, those seeking help should remember that everything online has gone through some sort of filtering process. That is to say, we only see the finished product; we don’t see the editing or years of work behind the product. Therefore, we should be cautious when listening to advice on how to quickly become successful.
Suri was a participant in the TIA Incubator. Having co-founded Muse, she was the founder and editor-in-chief of 13 Degrees magazine, and she was a John A. Golden '66 Fellow.