Program: Honours Actuarial and Financial Mathematics Co-op (B.Sc.)
Hometown: Karachi, Pakistan
STATS 3D03 taught by Dr. Narayanaswamy Balakrishnan. It was the most difficult course I had taken up to that point, but it taught me that perseverance and the countless hours you put into a single assignment will pay off.
I am most thankful to have met the upper-years and professors who spoke to me honestly during my first year. It would be unfair to credit only one person, as a vast number of different perspectives shaped my decision to pursue mathematics and made me the person graduating five years later. What stuck with me most was the conversations, not the kind that happen during lectures or info sessions, but the casual, unguarded kind that happen after a Math and Stats Society event or while walking in a hallway outside the lecture hall. Upper-years would speak openly about their own first year, about the uncertainty they held and how differently things had turned out from how they believed they would. Professors would take a moment during office hours to ask how I was doing outside of school. Those conversations changed how I saw my program and helped me envision a possible future with myself as part of that program. I came to McMaster certain I was in the wrong program. The right people, speaking at the right moments, changed that, and I am ever grateful to them.
I will be most proud of the years I spent with the Math and Stats Society, working from General Member up to Co-President. I came to McMaster lost in the way that first-year students are lost; uncertain. I was largely convinced I was the only one who felt that way. However, the society and the upper years who offered me guidance freely and openly changed that. Sharing the advice that no syllabus could ever contain, the real “if you know, you know” advice was the generosity that really stuck with me. I knew then that I wanted to give that same generosity back. To be the upper year that a lost first-year student could turn to for advice. I wanted to be able to share my perspective and work towards assuring them that things do, eventually, work out. My tenure on society gave me exactly that: the chance to show up for others the way others had once shown up for me. That is what I am most proud of.
I will be most proud to show my degree to my parents. Being first-generation immigrants, they sacrificed everything to secure a better life for my siblings and me. I dedicate this degree to my mother, who raised four children largely on her own during the long stretches my father was away for work – working every day to give her children a better life, and making countless sacrifices we are forever thankful for. I also dedicate this degree to my father, who spent nearly six to eight consecutive months at a time away at sea as a captain in the merchant navy. He was only reachable when his ship was loading and offloading cargo, and his sacrifice directly supported our family. We are endlessly grateful to him.
Uncertainty is okay. When I arrived at McMaster in the Fall of 2021 through the math and stats gateway program, I had one goal: transfer to computer science – the program that had already rejected me. My surrounding classmates seemed to have their futures planned out to the last detail; courses mapped, careers chosen, and grad schools they wanted to attend. I felt like the only person improvising. Then I decided to attend a Math and Stats Society event, met some upper years, and learned something unexpected. The students who now spoke passionately about graduate research in mathematics had, not long ago, been exactly where I was — uncertain. Their first-year selves would not have recognized them. So here is the inside tip: find your people early, and ask them how they got where they are. Everyone has a story of doubt, of a detour, of a door that closed and a window they eventually climbed through. Hearing those stories won’t erase your uncertainty, but it will make it feel a great deal less lonely. Loneliness, more than anything else, is what makes uncertainty so hard to bear.
Convocation, Students