July/August 2009
Around the Quads
Student Spotlight: Gap Year Helped Zehra Hashmi ’12 Prepare for College
By Nathalie Alonso ’08
Zehra Hashmi ’12 made the most of a gap year between high school and college.
Born and raised in Islamabad, Pakistan, Hashmi graduated from secondary school in 2007. Instead of immediately beginning college, whether in her home country or elsewhere, she spent a year pursuing interests in journalism and education before diving into higher education.
“It was as simple as me not having figured out where to go for college,” she explains. “[Afterward,] I was very prepared for college because I’d gone through a year of being ready to go. I was relaxed.”
Hashmi, who began learning English at 3 and describes herself as a voracious reader, spent the first three months after secondary school working for BBC Radio Pakistan. She researched, wrote and broadcast human interest stories in Urdu to rural regions of the country.
“You get to meet people from all over the world,” Hashmi says of the experience. “They gave me a lot of freedom in finding stories and recording them. It was a great experience because I learned how to type in Urdu and how to use sound equipment.”
After her stint at the BBC, Hashmi taught history and English to sixth- and seventh-grade students at her alma mater, the Khaldunia School, in the Pakistani capital. The teaching experience later became the topic of the admission essay she wrote as part of her application for the College.
“I did a lot of fun stuff with the kids,” says Hashmi, who taught a course on the history of religion. “I think a lot of the time we underestimate children, but they have their own forms of intelligence and their own intellect.”
When the time came to continue her own studies, a combination of academics and location made the College a good fit for Hashmi.
“I couldn’t really stay in Pakistan because I wanted to do history or comparative literature or something along those lines, and Pakistan is very oriented toward business or engineering or medicine.” Hashmi, who is leaning towards a major in history and anthropology, adds, “Liberal arts were a big attraction for me in general.
“If you’re coming from abroad and you’re in a city that is as multicultural and diverse as New York, at least for me, it made the transition easier,” she adds. “I can never get lonely here.”
Hashmi, the younger of two sisters, had never been to the United States prior to arriving in New York a week before orientation to participate in Columbia Urban Experience, a week-long community service program for incoming first-year students.
It was a fitting transition for Hashmi, who had spent summer 2006 as a volunteer at the Spinal Injury Unit at the National Institute for the Handicapped in Islamabad, where victims of the earthquake that stuck Pakistan in 2005 were still in recovery. Among other duties, she assisted patients with physical therapy and conducted art workshops.
After the 2007 flood that devastated Balochistan, the country’s largest province, Hashmi and a group of classmates went door to door in Islamabad, collecting donations for victims. The funds were used to purchase supplies that Hashmi helped deliver throughout the affected region.
“It was an eye-opening experience for me,” she says. “It made me very aware of what’s outside of living in a bubble in Islamabad. The little that they had was gone.”
During her first year in the College, Hashmi, a John Jay Scholar, was community chair of the College Undergraduate Scholar’s Program Alliance. She also was a corresponding editor for the first issue of Awaaz, a student journal of South Asian affairs, and is a member of Club Dimensions, a student group dedicated to creating awareness about South Asian culture and politics through art.
Though Hashmi has a long way to go in defining her career interests, she plans to return to Pakistan after graduation. Her gap year experiences have given her a vision for possible trajectories.
“I still have journalism as an option, but I would like to like teach or do something with education in Pakistan,” she says.
Nathalie Alonso ’08, from Queens, majored in American studies. She is an editorial producer of and contributing writer to LasMayores.com, the Spanish-language Web site for MLB.com.