11 Years, 5 Countries, and 4,500 Miles to Commencement

Sanda Kikic, a 28-year-old refugee of Bosnia, has waited 11 years, learned three new languages, repeated four years of high school, and immigrated to the United States to receive her degree in electrical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

On May 14, 1992, nearly 11 years to her Commencement Day, Kikic (then 17) and her 12-year-old brother fled their war-torn hometown of Tuzla, Bosnia.

	Thomas Griffin

A War-Torn Exodus
The country’s civil war had advanced into the town, and authorities would let no one within a 60-mile radius. Frightened, separated from their parents, and with only a few days worth of clothes and money, Kikic and her 12-year-old brother huddled with 28 other refugees at the house of a neighboring Good Samaritan before crossing the Hungarian border to Budapest. Once there, Kikic secured passage to Brussels where she and her brother planned to live with a friend of their father’s.

But once the pair reached Belgium, their father’s friend, whose wife had left him the day before, told them he could not care for Kikic, her brother, and his own three children. So they called a half-sister of Kikic’s mother whom they had never met.

“The only way to go was forward,” Kikic says matter-of-factly. “We had no other choice — we couldn’t stand around and cry. We knew we wanted to finish school and find our parents, and we did eventually.”

The aunt, who was living in Germany, agreed to take them in temporarily — Kikic and her brother stayed for three years. They learned to speak fluent German, and Kikic repeated high school because she could not receive credit for courses she took in Bosnia. They finally reunited with their parents, who had also escaped, in 1995.

Changing Luck — Following in Her Father’s Footsteps
In late 1998, Kikic’s luck seemed to be changing. Her father discovered a program that helped bring Bosnian refugees of mixed-religion marriages to the U.S. The family applied and was selected. Kikic’s father used the AltaVista Internet search engine to locate an acquaintance living in Corning, N.Y., and the family packed eight bags of belongings and moved to the U.S. in February 1999.