“I come from an indigenous community residing in remote Badakhshan territory. The location of my region was a primary reason for an always-constraint access to quality education. With hard work and determination, my potential got recognized by the prestigious University of Central Asia (UCA), where I pursued my undergraduate degree thanks to merit-based scholarships.

With the promise of becoming a changemaker to others, I began tutoring students to help them strengthen their English and mathematics skills. Currently, most of them are attaining their degrees from UCA, AUCA, and other prestigious universities. Some of them became the first-generation students. Next, I was a project proposer at CounterPart International. One of the highlights was raising awareness about domestic violence among female high school and university students through presentations and creation of focus group discussions with the lead organization on the matter, in Khorog.

After these contributions I wanted my impact to scale up. I joined a consulting firm working with youth in business throughout developing and developed countries. My input to the project with baseline assessments, identification of age as a deterministic variable have created a solid ground for further analysis for our project. As a result, Central Asian youth entrepreneurship market received an EUR200 million donation to develop their business strategies, incentivising more youth to come back to their home countries. This solution may even attribute to the further underlaying problem of massive youth migration to Russia and other western countries.

After graduating from Brown in May 2025, I returned to the University of Central Asia and worked for about six months with the Institute of Public Policy and Administration, UCA’s think tank, on a project about contemporary economic issues in Central Asia. In that role, I helped research the topic, made the work more technical using Excel and R, and delivered lectures to students based on the findings. I am now working as a teaching/research associate at UCA’s School of Arts and Sciences, while also partnering with a foundation, Surge AEI, to facilitate lectures on health economics and climate change economics. It was very meaningful to return to UCA as a staff member and help students become more competitive for graduate study and the job market by making coursework more applied and technically relevant.”