An interview on transforming passion into career
Adeeb Shams and Saqiful Alam are two of the trend-breaking youth inspiration of Bangladesh. Adeeb Shams, Founder of Harriken — a tech startup providing one-stop solution to restaurants and dining options in Dhaka — and an MBA from Georgetown University while Saqiful Alam, Advisor at Harriken and Lecturer at North South University (NSU), is a graduate from Manchester Business School. Recently Sanjida Tanny interviewed them to know their thoughts about how passion can turn into career. Below is the gist of the interview.
Career pursuit: The journey so far
After completing his undergrads from USA, Adeeb Shams decided to come back to Bangladesh and like a regular recent graduate, made the conventional choice of going for jobs with ‘big names’ as he claims. Completing his tenure from places like CitiBank, N.A. and BRAC Bank, he chose to learn more on opportunities he could create and went for his masters. While he was gaining knowledge on an interactive way of learning, he decided to come back to Dhaka to meet some real life, regular problems the city faced, while one might decide to go for a food expedition.
According to Saqiful Alam, the answer has always been selecting the passion that will make him a full time employee but does not require him to do a job. How? By being a mentor and guide, whether to his friends back in undergrad and postgrad life, or to his students ever since he joined NSU as a lecturer.
“I noticed that there is a gap between academics and the startups, a connection is missing. Hence, connecting these students with startups for real life experiences is what I have been looking up to. Being a 100% academician was never the plan, being an enabler was,” says Saqiful Alam.
The necessity of collaboration: Using communication for growth
Both the interviewees had very similar views on it where they preferred networking to be a key role player for the youth today in order to grow. However, Adeeb Shams jotted down his lessons from the US based business school towards networking as a learning that requires an individual to go out of their comfort zone in order to achieve their ultimate end goal. He advises that relatively poor networking skills tend to be more of a cultural issue that needs to have at least the three impression stages to improve the art of networking. These three stages are the communication, the impact made and following up.
On this note, Saqiful Alam’s view suggests that the stages can be further elaborated into meet people, identify places to meet people, be a mindful listener, approach the right way, clear your objectives of discussion, hit the interest point and be specific.
Contributing to entrepreneurship
The city of Dhaka is blooming with inspiring stories of innovation and entrepreneurship. As an advisor and mentor, Saqiful Alam believes that his most valuable investment in last 3 years were on people. He now sees them growing as individual youth icons representing their passion for their work. He encourages professionals and students to do the same for personal and collective growth.
Passion: What should it make one do?
“Life is short, so start asking yourself what exactly you want to do with it,” says Adeeb Shams. He specifically points out to the recent graduates today that one will only be remembered for what he/she has done and hence needs to be clear about the journey he/she wants to follow.
As Saqiful Alam says, “You need to start believing in yourself and give everything to the passion and hang on to it.”
The interviewer Sanjida Tanny (sanjida.a.tanny@gmail.com) is a fourth year student of Mathematics and Natural Science at BRAC University. The original interview published on The Financial Express can be accessed here.
