Finding Opportunities in Crisis: A Conversation with Zeenat Ahmad

Choosing a path that fits, not one that is expected

The episode opens with Muzamil in conversation with Zeenat Ahmad, a marketing professional whose career trajectory began with a set of choices that ran against the grain of what was expected of her. The conversation moves quickly into the question of how she ended up in accountancy rather than medicine or engineering - the two fields that, as she describes it, absorbed almost every high-achieving student in her environment.

Zeenat is direct about the pressure she faced. Her mother had wanted her to become a doctor from an early age, and the broader social logic was simple: if you were good at your studies, medicine was the destination. Engineering was considered a field for boys. “Logon ne bola tha,” she recalls, “yaar ek toh larki hai - engineering kare, yeh toh larkon ki field hoti hai.” (“People said: she’s a girl - engineering is a field for boys.”) She had absorbed enough of this to feel the pull of medicine, but she was equally honest with herself that she could not picture herself in it. “Mujhe yeh meri field nahi hai,” she says - this is not my field.

What she describes is not rebellion for its own sake. It is a gradual process of elimination, driven by a clear-eyed reading of her own interests and temperament. She had sat with the question long enough to know that medicine would be a performance, not a vocation.

Scholarships as a practical strategy, not a lucky break

A significant portion of the conversation is devoted to how Zeenat navigated the financial realities of higher education in Pakistan. Her family’s circumstances meant that the cost of a private college or university was a genuine constraint. What she describes, however, is not helplessness but active research.

She had applied for a government scholarship at the matriculation level, and later pursued a scholarship through a national programme that covered tuition and, in some cases, living expenses. The process was competitive - written tests, interviews, financial background checks - and she walked Muzamil through each stage with precision. The scholarship, she explains, was not simply awarded on academic merit. It factored in whether a student had attended a government school, the family’s income, utility bills, and other indicators of financial need. A limited number of places were available, and the selection involved multiple rounds.

Muzamil pushes her on the decision-making at each fork in the road - why she cancelled one university admission, why she applied to one programme over another. Her answers reveal a consistent logic: she was always calculating which path gave her the most room to move, even when the immediate option looked less prestigious.

Engineering, accountancy, and the question of genuine interest

Zeenat eventually entered engineering, specifically chemical and mechanical streams, but she is candid that her interest was never fully engaged. She describes the experience of sitting in lectures and feeling that her mind was elsewhere - not because she lacked ability, but because the subject matter did not hold her curiosity in the way she needed it to.

The turn toward chartered accountancy came from a different kind of recognition. She had encountered accounting as a subject and found that it held her attention in a way that engineering had not. “Jab main koi subject padhti thi jo mera favourite tha,” she says, “toh mujhe aise hi maza aata tha jaise main koi novel parh rahi hoon.” (“When I studied a subject I loved, it felt like reading a novel.”) That quality of absorption - the sense that learning was not a duty but a pleasure - became her benchmark.

Muzamil notes that this clarity of thought is striking, and Zeenat acknowledges that it did not arrive all at once. It came from trying things, noticing what felt forced, and being willing to redirect. The chartered accountancy path, she explains, involves a structured progression: inter-level papers, articleship of three and a half years, and a series of examinations that cannot be rushed. The timeline is roughly five to six years in total. She was partway through this process at the time of the conversation.

Limited internet access and the habit of purposeful learning

One of the more unexpected threads in the conversation is Zeenat’s account of her relationship with the internet. She did not have a personal device or home internet access until her first year of college, when a scholarship enabled her to get a phone. Before that, she used a friend’s family computer, borrowing time carefully and using it for specific tasks - searching for scholarship information, printing forms, doing research.

She reflects that this constraint shaped something useful in her. Because access was limited, she never developed the habit of using the internet passively. “Mera yeh tha,” she says, “ki sirf kaam ki cheez hoti thi - woh toh printer paper use se zyada internet duty par hoon.” The scarcity made her deliberate. When she did go online, she went with a purpose.

Muzamil draws out the contrast with students who have unlimited access but use it without direction. Zeenat’s point is not that restriction is inherently good, but that the habit of asking “what am I actually here to find?” is one that unlimited access can erode if you are not careful.

Writing publicly as a way of thinking out loud

Later in the discussion, Zeenat describes a period during which she began posting on social media - short pieces on current events, including a post about online examinations during the pandemic. She had noticed that students were confused and anxious about the shift to online learning, and she wrote something that tried to address that directly.

The response was mixed. Some engagement, some indifference. But she describes the act of writing itself as clarifying. Putting a position into words forced her to test whether she actually believed it, and to anticipate how someone else might read it. She had also written privately for some time before posting publicly, and she notes that the private writing was where the real thinking happened.

Muzamil asks about her longer-term ambitions, and she mentions journalism as something she had considered earlier - drawn to it, she says, because her household always had news channels on and she was interested in opinion and political commentary. She eventually set that aside, partly because she recognised that what she wanted was to express a point of view, and accountancy gave her a different but equally rigorous way of doing that.

Personal conduct as the only credible form of change

By the end of the conversation, Zeenat turns to a question that Muzamil raises about Pakistan’s trajectory - whether she sees meaningful change coming. Her answer is grounded and unsentimental. She does not dismiss the possibility of change, but she locates it in individual behaviour rather than in collective declarations.

She gives a specific example: on a school trip, she and her friends had made a point of keeping their litter in their bags rather than throwing it on the ground. When one person in the group started to drop something, the others stopped them. “Agar hum 10 log ek jagah khade hain,” she says, “aur main ne kaha nahi toh mujhe koi rok dega.” (“If ten of us are standing in one place and I say no, someone will stop me.”) The logic extends outward: if you are not willing to act with integrity in the small, observable moments of your own life, the larger rhetoric of national improvement is empty.

She is equally clear-eyed about corruption in professional life, including in audit and finance. She does not pretend it does not exist. But her position is that the only starting point she controls is her own conduct - and that this is not a small thing.

Muzamil closes the conversation having drawn out a portrait of someone who has consistently chosen clarity over convenience: in her field of study, in her use of limited resources, and in how she thinks about her role in a society she intends to return to and work within.