The YouTuber who got into 12 universities and said yes to all

Starting YouTube to mock her sisters — then doing exactly what they did

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing Zainab Fatima as a rising YouTuber with over 200,000 subscribers, noting with some amusement that she had promised to come on the show months earlier and life had gotten in the way. When the conversation begins, Zainab’s origin story is immediately self-deprecating.

Her younger sisters had started making skits on YouTube after watching international creators. Zainab’s response at the time was to make fun of them for it. “Kya aap log itne wele ho, aap logon ke bas yahi kaam hai” — roughly, what do you people have nothing better to do? A year later, she was doing the same thing. She had just finished her O-level exams, was bored, and decided to make a video. She describes that first video as so cringey she can no longer watch it. But she started enjoying the process, and that was enough.

The channel grew slowly and inconsistently. For the better part of a year she was posting once a month, sometimes less. She had no real framework for what she was doing. What changed the trajectory was a video about college life in Pakistan, posted when she started A-levels. It took her from around 3,000 subscribers to 16,000 in one upload. Then a prank video — she convinced her father she had gotten a tattoo — eventually crossed a million views. “Unhone bola mujhe heart attack ho” — he told her she was giving him a heart attack — and then blamed her school for the influence. The prank video was the moment she understood what consistency and audience connection could actually do.

The counselor who said forget the US

Later in the discussion, Zainab walks through the school experience that shaped her path abroad, and it is not a flattering portrait of Pakistani private schooling.

At Beaconhouse Model Town, she says sports teachers would tell her she couldn’t be on the team because of her hijab. She stayed quiet about it at the time, something she says she would not do now. When she was preparing for O-levels, the school threatened to withhold her exam registration because she had missed a midterm while ill. Her parents pushed back, but the school’s position was that it simply would not send her name forward.

She moved to LGS for A-levels, where she heard students regularly went abroad for undergraduate study. She was excited. Then she met a counselor who looked at her grades and told her to forget the United States entirely — Turkey was more realistic, and even a scholarship there was uncertain.

A friend she had made through YouTube, a student in the US, told her to ignore the counselor and apply anyway. She applied to twelve universities. All twelve accepted her. All twelve offered scholarships. She chose a university in Texas — in the Fort Worth area — that gave her a full 100% scholarship. “That was huge,” she says, “because I didn’t think ke mujhe admission bhi milega.”

Muzamil notes the parallel with a previous guest, Imad, who had spoken about similarly discouraging school experiences. Zainab says she could relate to almost everything he described.

What is actually broken in Pakistani schools

The conversation turns to what specifically is wrong with the system, not just individual bad actors within it.

Zainab identifies two things. First, the curriculum is stuck in a different era — she gives the example of being asked which fruit a particular poet preferred, and asks what that has to do with any future career. Second, and more seriously, the culture of competition has curdled into something that actively harms students. “Itni had tak competition ke people are depressed now, unhein devalue karna, degrade karna just because kisi ek exam mein they didn’t do well — that’s wrong.”

Muzamil raises the growing number of student suicides linked to board exam pressure. Neither of them has a clean answer, but the point lands: the pressure is real, it is coming from somewhere, and the system is not equipped to absorb it.

Choosing strategic communications over film

When Muzamil asks about her university plans, Zainab explains a decision that reveals how clearly she thinks about her own work.

She had initially planned to study film, television, and digital media — an obvious fit for a YouTuber. But she pulled back. Her YouTube content is not cinematic in that sense, and she realized she would be studying something adjacent to her work rather than something that would deepen it. She researched other programs and landed on strategic communications. The curriculum covered how to run campaigns with brands, how to position messaging, how to think about audiences at scale. “Being a youtuber ya being someone who is working in this field, aapko bahut zyada help hogi.”

She also credits YouTube itself with building the confidence to pursue it. She describes her previous self as someone who would not have been able to walk into a room and communicate clearly. The channel changed that.

Midsummer Chaos and the double standard in Pakistani criticism

Muzamil asks Zainab about Midsummer Chaos, a Pakistani web series that had become a cultural flashpoint at the time of recording. Zainab discloses upfront that the creator is a friend of hers, and that she had messaged him directly with her feedback.

Her position is measured. The production has room to improve — she told him that herself. But the criticism directed at it often ignores the fact that a teenager built something that got the entire country talking. “He is actually doing something,” she says, while most people his age are scrolling Instagram.

The more interesting part of the exchange is Muzamil’s pushback on the morality critique. He points out that Pakistani audiences consume rap music that is saturated with drugs, alcohol, and explicit content without any of the outrage directed at Midsummer Chaos. The difference, he argues, is not moral — it is about proximity. When a Pakistani show depicts Pakistani teenagers doing things that Pakistani audiences know happen but prefer not to see named, the discomfort is different in kind from watching foreign content. “Hum gore ka dekh lete, hum Pakistan nahi dekhte ke hamare Pakistan hi dekha hai.”

Zainab agrees that the double standard is real. “Jo kuch usme dikhaya hai na, woh hota hai, but no one wants to talk about it.” She draws a line at normalization — she is not arguing that the content should be celebrated — but she is clear that denying something exists because it is uncomfortable is not a serious position.

Being a 19-year-old woman in Pakistan

Muzamil asks Zainab directly what it is like to be a young woman in Pakistan right now. Her answer is specific rather than abstract.

She wanted to learn cycling. Her family decided it was not safe for her to be on the road. She finds this particularly strange given that her mother’s generation did exactly that. She describes a collaboration opportunity with another YouTuber that her parents shut down because they did not know him well enough — a reasonable concern, she acknowledges, but one that does not apply to male creators in the same way.

She also raises a case she knows personally: a woman who wanted to become a doctor and was told by her father that she could not, because the profession would require her to interact with men. “That just blew my mind,” Zainab says. “You are telling your daughter not to be a doctor.”

The conversation then moves into territory that Muzamil has clearly thought about at length. He argues that a significant portion of what gets presented in Pakistan as Islamic prescription around women is actually subcontinental cultural inheritance — practices that predate Islam’s arrival in the region and were absorbed into it rather than derived from it. He points to inheritance rights as an example: clearly defined in Islamic law, routinely violated in Pakistani practice, and almost never the subject of feminist campaigns that might actually have broad appeal. “Islam ke andar aap jo bhi left right kar lo na, aap fahaashat ki baat kar len — yeh basic cheezein hain.”

Zainab engages with this directly. She describes attending a women’s rights demonstration where journalists were screaming at participants, and stepping in to pull her acquaintance away from the confrontation. She notes that when she posts about these issues on Instagram, a significant portion of her followers become angry. She does not back away from the topic, but she is clear-eyed about the cost.

Animal welfare as a mirror for Pakistani society

Toward the end of the conversation, Zainab talks about her work with an animal rescue organization in Pakistan. She had five cats at one point, her father had fourteen. She volunteers with a page called TWS on Instagram that rescues stray animals.

What she describes is less about cats specifically and more about what the treatment of animals reveals. She mentions visiting Turkey and seeing stray dogs with health tags — a municipal system of care for street animals. The contrast with Pakistan was immediate. “Pehli dafa wahan par jaate ho aur aapko realization hoti hai ke duniya kis tarah — that’s Islam.”

She references a hadith about accountability for animals that die within one’s governance. The gap between that standard and what she sees in Pakistani markets — where animals are sold and mistreated openly — is, for her, a symptom of a broader failure of imagination. Muzamil connects it to travel: most Pakistanis have not been outside the country, so they have no reference point for what a different standard looks like, and therefore no pressure to demand one.

Where the YouTube channel goes from here

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks Zainab where she sees her channel going now that she is leaving Pakistan for Texas.

Her answer is practical. She wants to help Pakistani students understand how to apply abroad — the process, the possibilities, the fact that counselors who tell you to forget the US are not always right. She also wants to document life as an international student. Beyond that, she is honest about wanting to change the format of her content. She has started to feel that pure vlogs have a ceiling. “Kab tak log yahi dekhte rahenge aur main khud bhi ab thak gayi hoon” — how long will people keep watching the same thing, and she herself is tired of it.

She is not planning to stop. She describes wanting to make videos indefinitely — even, she says with some humor, into old age — because the channel functions as a living record of her life. “Mere itni memories itna record ho jaati hai.” It is not work in the way she fears work might feel. It is closer to a diary that other people happen to watch.

Muzamil closes by telling Zainab that what impressed him most was not the subscriber count or the scholarship — it was the decision to choose strategic communications. Recognizing that YouTube fame is not the same as a film education, and choosing accordingly, struck him as the kind of clear thinking that tends to compound over time. “I can see in your mind ke you have a very problem-solving attitude,” he says, “and I know for a fact, Inshallah, you do great things.”