I came into the Doyle Dialogue Fellows (DDF) program thinking I knew how to have hard conversations. Dialogue felt like something I did, not something I needed to learn to do differently. That assumption did not survive the first few sessions.
The skill I developed most visibly was learning to separate what I feel from what I say, and to treat that gap as a space worth inhabiting. Before this program, my instinct in disagreement was to build an argument. I'd listen, but I was listening for entry points. DDF taught me not to abandon my perspective, but to hold it loosely enough to hear someone else's beliefs.
In Your Shoes™ was the first framework that disrupted my default assumptions. Its immersive, call-and-response structure forced me out of my own vantage point in a way that reading or discussion alone never has. I wasn't analyzing someone's experience, but rather, at least for a few minutes, sitting inside it. Resetting the Table (RTT) added structure to that shift. It taught me to recognize patterns of destructive conflict and to remain present amid disagreement without shutting down.
Before the fellowship, I understood polarization mostly as a political phenomenon: something that happens in elections, on cable news, and in online discourse. I now see it as something far more granular. Polarization lives in the small moments: the assumption you make about why someone holds a position, the question you don't ask because you think you already know the answer, the instinct to categorize someone before you’ve actually listened to them.
Those small moments carry particular weight in medicine. I want to practice medicine in communities where language barriers, immigration status, and cultural distance shape clinical encounters. The dialogue skills I built this semester are central to that work. But the challenge going forward is consistency. Dialogue skills degrade when you’re tired, rushed, or emotionally invested, which is to say, exactly when they matter most. DDF did not solve that problem for me, but it gave me tools I can return to when I notice myself slipping back into old patterns.
The hardest and most useful thing I learned this semester is that being good at arguing is not the same as being good at dialogue. I'm still working on that difference within myself.
Krithik Ashokkumar (C’28) is an undergraduate student in the College of Arts & Sciences majoring in biology on the pre-medical track. At Georgetown, he is also a Laidlaw Scholar, Global Health Institute Fellow, and Global Health Governance as Public Service Scholar. Krithik brings a passion for fostering dialogue across cultural differences to advance humane, globally responsive models of care. He is a member of the 2026 Doyle Dialogue Fellows cohort.
