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The story of a woman who gave up her academic dream for 25 years
In 1984, Himani Datar was offered a UGC fellowship. She was 25, academically accomplished, and already imagining a future in research. Then life arrived — a marriage, a family, two decades of raising children while building one of Chennai’s most quietly significant voluntary organizations. The fellowship was given- up, the dream was filed away under ‘someday’.
Someday came at 62, when a colleague mentioned, almost in passing, that the Doctor of Business Administration could be done part-time, online, without giving up work. “I didn’t know that,” Himani says.
By then she had spent 20 years as Honorary Secretary of the Guild of Service, one of India’s oldest NGOs — effectively its CEO — running programs for women, children, and the economically marginalized across Chennai, India. She had two additional master’s degrees already, including one in Population Sciences completed between 1999 and 2001. Studying was not new to her. Studying for a doctorate, at 62, in the middle of everything else, was.
Her research examined the empowerment of physically challenged individuals — specifically, major lower limb amputees. The question that drove it was not academic; it came from her work: what does society assume is empowering for vulnerable people, and what do those people actually want for themselves? The gap, her research found, is significant. “If you are trying to help somebody,” she says, “don’t give them what you want. That’s not help.”
Armed with three degrees, she attended her first ever graduation ceremony in May 2026, in San Francisco. A distance program, another country, the wrong timing; something always came-up. In May 2026, in a gown, on a stage, she collected the doctorate she had first imagined in her twenties.
“I feel happy that I did it at a later age,” she says. “Perhaps I have done something more meaningful. I would have done it more for career advancement. Now it was for the advancement of people.”
She plans to take her findings directly to the policymakers and organizations working with amputees in India, and push for change. “I think what happened was good,” she says. “I think that’s what it is.”
Himani Datar completed the Doctor of Business Administration through Golden Gate University’s online DBA program — a fully accredited, fully online doctorate for working professionals.
Learn more about GGU’s DBA program and discover other learner stories →
