Even as a little girl, Dr. Nitasha Sharma aspired to become a college professor like her parents, whose careers let the family spend entire summers or longer in either her mother's native Brooklyn, New York, or her father's native India. She dreamed of long vacations as a grown-up and going home for lunch on weekdays. But during a stay in India when Sharma learned Hindi as a middle schooler, she realized how such travels fed intellectual growth and how her parents' work nourished the minds of their students. Today, Sharma, an assistant professor of African American studies and Asian American studies at Northwestern University, is a member of countless two-generation U.S. academic families. Dr. Nitasha Sharma, a 2009 "Diverse" Emerging Scholar whose research examines relations between racial groups, including the influence of African-American-inspired hip hop culture on musicians of South Asian descent, has often related to her parents as their academic peer. Following parents into the academy is not without challenges, particularly when scholars are overshadowed by their more famous parents. And, sometimes, a boundary between parent and child is warranted--if only temporarily. Having grown up in the academy, the author discusses how second-generation scholars chart their own course to become their professor parents' academic peer.