I was on a long-haul trucking trip, somewhere between Mississauga and Montreal, but my mind was elsewhere. I was thinking about my personal journey and wondering whether this was my future. I had dropped out of university, and now I was riding with a family friend who owned a trucking company to see whether this might be a viable career option for me. Trucking was more reliable and paid better than what I had been doing, juggling three part-time jobs in retail and customer service to make ends meet. I was helping support my mother and two younger sisters and needed a job I could count on. But I couldn’t shake the sense that I would be choosing this route with feelings of failure looming over my head—a path I knew would lead to unhappiness.
When I was younger, I had been a straight-A student with aspirations to attend a top university. But things started to go downhill for me in middle school after the 9/11 attacks perpetrated against the United States, where I was living as a recent immigrant from Pakistan. At school the following day, a teacher publicly insinuated that I was somehow responsible for the attacks. That evening, I was seriously injured during football practice. The next day, our family businesses were vandalized. The racism posed a clear threat to our safety and pushed us to move back to Pakistan.
Then, my parents divorced. Torn between wanting to be with my mother, who moved to Canada alone with no support, or with my beloved aging grandfather in Pakistan, I moved back and forth but became depressed and struggled with my academics. I barely graduated from high school and enrolled at the only university that offered me a spot, feeling that I had already failed.
That mindset triggered a vicious cycle. I was too discouraged to thrive in my studies, and my resulting struggles reinforced my belief that I was failing. I began to suffer from severe depression, and the death of my grandfather was the final straw. With no real hope for the future, I dropped out and returned to my mother and sisters in Mississauga.
My path suddenly became clear: I had to finish what I had started and go back to school. – M. SHEHRYAR KHAN, UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO
That’s when I went on the trucking run. During those long hours on the road, my grandfather’s last words of advice, in a letter he wrote when I started university, came back to me: “Please be brave (which you are), accept the challenges of life (which is never a bed of roses), work hard and harder, and you will see the blessings of Almighty God and our prayers are with you at all times. It is now or never. I hope you will never disappoint us.” With his words ringing in my ears, I discovered a newfound resolve. My path suddenly became clear: I had to finish what I had started and go back to school.
To get back on track, I needed to redo grade 12. I took a full course load while continuing to work enough part-time hours at Home Depot and Walmart to help pay the bills. After graduating from high school (again!), I began a university engineering co-op program, in which I would work as a paid intern every alternate term, allowing me to keep my student loans in check while continuing to help support my family.
t first, the fear of failure that had doomed my previous university endeavor continued to linger at the back of my mind. But I knew it would hold me back if I didn’t do something about it. So, I finally started counseling and therapy, which helped me realize that the outcome didn’t matter as much as knowing I tried my best, and over time I learned to keep my fear of failure in check. After completing my bachelor’s degree, I went on to a master’s and now a Ph.D., winning several research awards along the way—something I scarcely could have imagined just a few years earlier.
Grad school has been full of the challenges and setbacks that every student is well aware of, but my path to this point has made one thing clear: My fear of failure not only limited me, but kept me from achieving my goals. I finally internalized the words my grandfather wrote to me in that letter all those years ago. I hope I have made him proud.
