The work-study equation.

YOU should not have been doing your bachelors in Computer Sciences. Instead, you had all the potential of doing well in Business Administrations. This was a teacher telling me when I was on the verge of picking up a profession. He was a senior person professor specialising in marketing who had taught me in the my last year of the bachelor's degree which I had just finished during which I had led teams organising numerous events and had been the president of the Students Council for about half a year at my university. So, did I follow his advice? We will get there in a while.

If you are from the millennial generation, being the eldest in the family here in Pakistan has its highs and lows. Back in our teen days, in such situations, we mostly think it is mostly the 'lows', especially if your father is mostly living abroad to put bread (and a whole lot of butter as well) on the table. But with hindsight, I can tell you being the eldest is definitely more about the 'highs' than the 'lows'.

In the late 1980s and '90s, communication with people living abroad was not that swift and accessible as it is today, which resulted in taking a lot of decisions on your own. That was a part of growing up in such families. Though the joint family system was pretty strong at the time but I am still not sure if that was an element helpful or distracting in such situations.

I wanted to study architecture, but had already ended up doing bachelors in Computer Sciences without feeling too chuffed about it. This was the backdrop when the teacher spoke to me about what he thought I had the potential for. There were two decisions I took within days of that incident. One, I was not going pursue my masters in Computer Sciences anytime soon. Two, no matter what, I was going to give myself at least five years to decide where or what I will study for my master's degree.

The comments from the professor stayed with me as I started working in a multimedia house soon after my bachelors as a 3D Computer Graphics (CG) artist which was just what I had taken as an elective in my bachelor's programme. It was not long before I realised that sitting in front of machines for long hours was not something I could do for the rest of my life. I needed human interaction. This realisation made me shift my energies towards finding something closer to what I had done at university; events management. This is how I started working in the communications industry, starting with events but later...