I grew up in Karachi, Pakistan — a city of roughly 15 million people, which means a childhood surrounded by noise, density, and an incredible mix of languages, backgrounds, and histories packed into a single metropolitan sprawl. My parents had come from Afghanistan in 2001. The world, to me, had always been a place where people's lives were shaped by forces much larger than individual decisions.
In 2018, I was selected to attend UWC Red Cross Nordic in Flekke, Norway — a small coastal town about as far from Karachi in atmosphere as it is in geography. UWC RCN is a two-year international boarding school that brings together students from over 90 countries. The Red Cross connection is not incidental: the school is explicitly built around a set of values about peace, human dignity, and the responsibility that comes with education and opportunity.
What UWC RCN Was
Flekke is small. The school sits on a fjord, and outside of the school's own community, there isn't much else around. That turns out to be the point. When 200 students from 90+ countries are in a small place together, with limited ways to avoid each other, something happens to the usual social patterns. You end up eating dinner with people whose countries have complicated histories with yours. You work on group projects with people whose assumptions about how things work are entirely different from your own. You argue, sometimes badly, and eventually learn to navigate difference in ways that a larger, more dispersed environment wouldn't require.
I co-led LEAF — the Living, Environment, and Future group — which worked on sustainability and environmental projects within the school community. I won the Group 4 Project award in February 2019 for a team science project on the total energy consumption of the campus. The academic work was demanding, but the more significant education was the relational kind.
December 2019: Oslo
In December 2019, five UWC RCN students were selected to represent the school at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo. I was one of them. The prize that year was awarded to Abiy Ahmed Ali, Prime Minister of Ethiopia, for his efforts to end the twenty-year conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea and for his broader work in regional peacebuilding in East Africa.
The ceremony takes place in Oslo City Hall on December 10th — Human Rights Day. The hall fills with dignitaries, diplomats, scholars, and representatives from organizations across the world. We were there as students, which felt both improbable and, at the same time, exactly right: UWC's premise is that the next generation of people who matter in the world are already walking around in it, and that they should be in the room.
What I remember most is the quality of attention in the room. Everyone there was listening to something they believed was important. The speeches were about the long, slow work of peace — about how conflict ends not with a single gesture but through accumulated choices, institutional changes, and the willingness to pursue reconciliation even when it's politically costly. That framing has stayed with me.
What It Changed
Going from Karachi to Oslo to Norman, Oklahoma has a particular shape. Each transition has been about operating in a new context, with new rules, and learning to be useful within it. The UWC experience didn't give me answers — it gave me a particular kind of comfort with complexity and difference that I didn't have before.
That comfort shows up in the work I do now in ways that are hard to make explicit. Data engineering, at its best, is about making sense of complex, messy, diverse sources of information — and presenting that sense in a form that helps people make better decisions. The analogy to international education is imperfect, but the underlying skill — tolerating complexity long enough to find the underlying pattern — is the same.
Healthcare data is particularly unforgiving of oversimplification. The systems that produce the data have histories, quirks, and idiosyncrasies that reflect decades of organizational decisions. Working with that data well requires curiosity and patience with context, not just technical skill. I think some of that patience was learned in Flekke.
The Thread Forward
I'm now finishing an M.S. in Information Technology at the University of Oklahoma and working as a data engineer. The distance between a ceremony in Oslo City Hall and a pipeline optimization in Azure Data Factory is large, and I won't pretend otherwise. But the instinct that brought me to both — that the most important problems deserve real attention, regardless of scale — is the same one.
If you want to know more about the UWC experience or about what led me to data engineering, I've written more on the About page. And if you're working on something interesting in data infrastructure or AI, I'm always glad to talk — see the Contact page.