A Laramie student has won an award in the C-SPAN StudentCam competition. Arundathi Nair placed second in the High School West Division for her documentary titled Out of Many, One Out of One, Many.
Nair said this year's competition asked students to answer the question, "What does it mean to be American?" Nair said the question was challenging for her. As the daughter of immigrants, she has struggled with her national identity.
"In the end, I realized that being American means you have different identities. It's not just being one thing. Being American is one of the few identities where you can carry all of your history, ancestry, your ethnicity, race, all of those things, but still be American," Nair said.
Nair, who has placed in the West Division twice before, interviewed University of Wyoming professors to create her documentary. She said that talking to people she normally would not interact with was a great learning experience.
"It always challenges you to think about different perspectives. Because that's one of the requirements, to interview different people that might have different perspectives," said Nair.
Nair plans to compete in the StudentCam documentary one last time next year. You can watch her documentary, titled Out of Many, One Out of One, Many, on studentcam.org.