Rawshan Jabeen faced a difficult choice in the summer of 2018. At the time, Rawshan was balancing a master’s degree in health policy and management at AKU on the weekends with full time-work as a senior research assistant at the University’s community health sciences department.
Financial constraints meant that she couldn’t leave her job to pursue her degree full-time – a move she viewed as being crucial to her making an impact in her field – and Rawshan remembers feeling a sense of restlessness. At the time, she had noticed a wide range of opportunities opening up in the application of mobile health to maternal and child care that she was keen to explore.
However, pursuing these opportunities through a full-time master’s programme would require her to resign from her job and lose her source of income. Initially, she chose to pursue the ‘safe option’ of studying on the weekends alongside full-time work but this proved to be very challenging. As the demands of juggling her career and her studies started to affect her grades, she began to consider dropping out of her studies at AKU.
“I could have joined another university to do individual courses on an ad-hoc basis,” Rawshan remembers. “While this was a practical alternative, the stop-start nature of such an approach would further delay my long-term goal of making an impact by pursuing a master’s programme.”
At this stage, she had to decide whether to continue with the safe option or whether to take a risk and resign from her job. Rawshan was able to take a risk because of the University’s
Financial Assistance Programme which offered her 100 per cent financial assistance in the form of a zero-interest loan that had to be repaid five years after her graduation.
“Financial assistance made a difficult predicament into an easy choice,” said Rawshan. “It offered me the chance to complete my degree sooner and to thereby pursue my aspiration of improving the standard of maternal and child care offered by field-based community health workers.”
While financial assistance opened up a vital door, the best was yet to come. During the course of her full-time studies, a faculty member, Dr Shehla Zaidi, gave her the chance to work on a dream project,
Teeko, a mobile-health application, implemented in partnership with the Sindh government that has helped raised immunisation rates among children in Sindh.
Since her graduation, Rawshan has been offered two full-time positions and she’s taken up the position of a research coordinator at Zindagi Pursukoon (A Peaceful Life), a community mental health programme run by Interactive Research and Development, a global health delivery and research organisation.
“Had it not been for financial assistance, I’d still be at my old job watching people move ahead. I’d still be noticing gaps but lacking the conceptual tools and research methods to address them. The support of faculty and the financial assistance I received provided me an ideal way to achieve my aspiration of being an entrepreneur in the field of public health,” Rawshan said.