The campuses that built me.

Some of the most formative years of my life were spent on the Dhaka University campus — and not only in the classrooms. The real education happened everywhere: in the corridors of the faculty buildings, over endless cups of cha with friends who became family, in late-night debates about everything and nothing.

DU taught me how to think, how to argue, and how to belong to something bigger than myself. The campus has a way of marking you — decades of history in every brick, and the feeling that you're walking paths worn smooth by generations before you. Whenever I go back to Dhaka, the campus is always on my list. Some places stay home forever.

Waterloo was a different kind of classroom. Arriving as a newcomer, every part of it was a first — the snow on the way to early lectures, the silence of the libraries, the strange new rhythm of academic life in a second culture.

Those years taught me discipline more than anything: balancing studies with the practical weight of building a life in a new country. They also rooted me in this region — it's no accident that Kitchener-Waterloo became home. The friendships, the professors who took a chance on an international student, the small wins that felt enormous — they're all woven into who I am here.

My immigration studies at UBC were unlike anything before — because this time, the subject was personal. I had already lived the visa stamps, the waiting, the uncertainty. Now I was studying the system itself: the law, the policy, the machinery behind every newcomer's file.

It's a rare thing to study something you've survived. Every case study had a face in my memory. That education became the foundation of my work as a Regulated Canadian Immigration Consultant — and the reason I treat every client's file like it carries a family's whole future. Because it does.

English was my own first bridge — into universities, into Canada, into every chapter that followed. The CELTA was where I learned to build that bridge for other people: real classrooms, real learners, and the humbling discovery that knowing a language and teaching it well are two entirely different skills.

Teaching English still feels less like a job and more like passing along the keys I was once handed. Watching a learner's confidence switch on mid-sentence — that never gets old.