Jabin Ahmed

Jabin Ahmed remembers the time during her Sage years when she attended a campus lecture to earn extra credit in a Sociology class. The day after the lecture, she ran into her Sociology professor and he asked what she thought, expecting that she would have found the lecture valuable.

Jabin told him she’d found it of little interest.

Her professor’s reaction?

“He was proud that I’d told him what I really thought,” Jabin remembers. “He wanted his students to voice their honest opinions.”

Jabin says many of her professors were like that, and it fed a desire she had to discover her own voice, and follow her own path in life. When she was a student, she used a college fellowship grant to run an art program in Bangladesh. Today, she’s an activist and organizer, a co-founder of a Muslim youth program, and working as a family intervention specialist at a community service agency.

That drive she exhibits most certainly comes from within, but Jabin says the Sage experience kicked her into a higher gear. After being a high achiever in high school, she was humbled by classes that demanded she take it to another level. “I found everyday that I was being challenged to improve myself,” she says. “And I was meeting other women who were showing me what it meant to feel empowered.”

Jabin gained in confidence, got more focused, and began to develop her voice as an activist and writer. She went on to earn a master’s in Public Health. On top of all the other challenges she’s taken on, she’s working now on becoming an accomplished public speaker, and taking her writing to a level where she can publish.

She’s seen the changes she was able to make in her own life, now she wants to see how much she can change the world.