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Conversations
Ramla Qureshi: “A lot of people at UB could relate to what I was saying,
and wanted to help.”
Jaganathan Ragupathy: “More extracurricular involvement would allow
both students and faculty to broaden their horizons”
The UB School of Management Review’s Editor talks to Fulbright scholar and Structural
Engineering student Ramla Qureshi and Supply Chains and Operations Management student
Jaganathan Ragupathy about the collaborative project for encouraging young Pakistani women to
enter STEM programs and start a professional career the two scholars are working on under the
auspices of the Blackstone LaunchPad, and about the much-needed cooperation between engineering
and management.
Keywords: Blackstone LaunchPad; Fulbright scholars; gender gap; India; Structural and
Earthquake Engineering; Supply Chain management; Women Engineers Pakistan
Zhasmina Tacheva: Would you like to introduce yourselves?
Ramla Qureshi: I am Ramla Qureshi, a Fulbright scholar from Pakistan, working
towards an M.S. in Structural and Earthquake Engineering at the University at Buffalo.
I did my undergraduate studies in Pakistan, in civil engineering, and worked for two
years after that.
Jaganathan Raghupathy: My name is Jaganathan Raghupathy, a student at UB’s
School of Management in my last semester of the Master’s program in Supply Chains
and Operations Management. I went to College back in India and worked for many
years before deciding to come to UB for my Master’s. For the past few weeks, Ramla
and I have been working on the Women Engineers Pakistan project as part of the
Buffalo Student Sandbox program of the Blackstone LaunchPad.
Z.T.: What inspired both of you to enter your respective fields?
R.Q.: I always wanted to become a fighter pilot, but that didn’t happen. Engineering
was my “plan B.” At that point, I wasn’t exactly sure which type of engineering does
what, so I went for the one most inspiring to me, which was civil engineering.
J.R.: I am a restless person. I also tend to look at situations as problems in need of
solutions. This is exactly what Supply Chain Management—a very volatile and restless
field of Management that doesn’t have an issue solving problems—does. I was built
on the very foundation of every-day problem solving.
Z.T.: Ramla, you are the founder of the organization Women Engineers Pakistan (WEP); how
exactly did it start?
R.Q.: It started as a Facebook page. I graduated and started a page where I could share
videos and interesting things, and then one day the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan contacted
me. There was an engineer from NASA coming over and she wanted to meet our
team; but there was no team, it was just a Facebook page which had gained enormous
traction in a very short time, so I decided to make full use of the idea to create an
organization to go along with it.
Z.T.: I heard there was a personal story behind your decision, what exactly motivated you to stay in
engineering and what was your first experience in an engineering class?
R.Q.: In the first class of my undergraduate degree, one of my professors asked in a
very fatherly fashion, “Why did you choose engineering, it’s for boys, you’re not going
to make it,” and I remember, the first response I came up with was, “That’s exactly
what we’re here to prove wrong,” and it just stuck with me ever since.
Z.T.: Throughout your undergraduate studies, were you the only girl in class?
R.Q.: We had three classrooms, a total of 180 people, and I was one of the ten girls.
Z.T.: And you are one of the few who proceeded to get her Master’s degree in the U.S.?
R.Q.: A couple more girls made it here. Some went to universities in Pakistan for their
Master’s, others got a job, and a couple of them did not pursue the field any further.
Z.T.: What inspired you personally to come to the U.S. for your Master’s?
R.Q.: I had been working for two years in an oil and gas firm and figured out there
is so much more knowledge I am really not tapping into, and the world is moving so
fast. When I started looking for research centers around the world, three names came
up, especially for earthquake research: the MEEES consortium in Italy, UC Berkeley,
and UB. Of course, New Zealand has a lot happening there as well, and Japan for
sure, and Turkey, but the U.S. brings a whole new amount of exposure, especially
UC Berkeley and UB. What I was also looking forward to learning about here, was
building code practices and regulations, and the culture as a whole. A lot of what
inspired me to really pursue structural and earthquake engineering was the earthquake
that happened in 2005 in Pakistan which killed around 80,000 people and displaced a
100,000 more, and the major reason for the high death toll was not just the earthquake,
but also the lack of infrastructure, proper policy, and hazard mitigation. The U.S. is the
center of policy building and progress on these matters, so this was a very wholesome
experience, and it worked out pretty good.
Z.T.: Can you briefly describe the Fulbright application process, what it entails, and how your journey
started?
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R.Q.: Fulbright scholarships are very difficult to get because you are put through a
very rigorous screening process. You apply through a paper or an online application,
which itself is your presentation and has to be concise and precise at the same time.
After three or four months they call you in for an interview. Then you go through
the interview which is also a very rigorous process. There are three people from the
U.S. and three from Pakistan, and they grill you with all sorts of questions, especially
about culture shock and tell you that you have to be prepared to have many of your
ideas questioned. Then they make you wait, it’s a black hole at that time, because you
have no idea what is happening, then after some time they call you and tell you if you
are a primary or alternate candidate. Then the entire process of applying to American
universities starts. It’s a long process, encompassing more than a year.
Z.T.: There is a statement of purpose, right, what was yours about?
R.Q.: Mine was very much about all the things I spoke of: the reason why I chose to
study structural and earthquake engineering—Pakistan has a lot of talented people.
We’re just not at pace with the world right now, especially when it comes to engineering,
so I was trying to study what is happening in the world, in order to go back home and
research local trends and data regarding seismology in Pakistan and then come up with
codes and regulations, procedures, and practices that apply more locally instead of
copy-pasting things from international codes.
Z.T.: About how many Fulbright scholars are there at UB?
R.Q.: A lot of them, especially in the civil engineering department. In my cohort alone,
there were five people from Indonesia, Morocco, Russia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
Last year, there were people from Pakistan and Afghanistan. Before us, there were
people from Pakistan, Argentina, New Zealand, Bolivia, and Uruguay, so at any time,
the department has a lot of Fulbright scholars. I think every year, a minimum of 22 to
25 come to UB on the whole.
Z.T.: Is there a gender gap among the Fulbright scholars as well, or is it more equal?
R.Q.: In engineering, I think there is, because it’s directly proportionate to the number
of applicants, and there is a lack of participation of women in STEM fields. At UB
especially, we have women in law, architecture, and urban planning, which is also a
STEM field; then we have many women in literature, linguistics, and in the humanities
in general. In all honesty, I would say that Fulbright really focuses on getting more
women involved but then again, they work with what they have.
Z.T.: Would you describe yourself as a scholar-activist?
R.Q.: I think so, yes. I think I’ve been an activist about a lot of things over the course
of my education in Pakistan, while I was working, and then when I came here as well.
In
undergrad, I started the first society for my university, it was called the NUST1
Science
Society. That really brought together people from all different branches: mechanical,
electrical, biomedical, and civil engineering and computer science. What that did was
increase my network immensely and put things I was doing in perspective—I met
so many different people. I was also teaching at slum schools, in Islamabad over the
weekends, and continued doing that after I graduated, in Karachi. That was also part
of activism, I guess—I think the core of my activism has always been in education.
Z.T.: When it comes to education itself, is there still a big gender gap in Pakistan?
R.Q.: At the primary school level, not so much, but secondary, somewhat, and then
tertiary—very much. People send their girls to elementary school until 5th grade—we
do see a lot of female students, but as soon as it gets to middle and high schools, there
is much less female participation, and then at the college level, urban centers have the
largest enrollment of women. It has a lot to do with Pakistan being an agricultural
country, I guess. Most of the jobs are in the agricultural sector. Women mostly find
themselves working either agriculture-related or domestic jobs. There is a severe lack
of high-skill training, because these women remain stagnant all their life—they are
working, yes, sewing, or running a small hairdressing salon, but there is no progress
in that. These are low-skill trades which help people put food on the plate, but don’t
offer much progress, and the lack of universities and education awareness, and of
progressive structures and jobs, all stem from this. Maybe if we bring uniformity into
the education system, we might be able to create more jobs, and that might lead to
more education and probably more progress.
Z.T.: You have chosen to bring awareness to this issue through your organization, WEP, is this its
main mission?
R.Q.: We have been discussing this lately. In a nutshell, the end goal is to bridge the
gender gap in STEM fields. How we do it, is by trying to encourage, facilitate, and
basically establish women who want to participate in these disciplines. A major reason
for women to drop out is also because it is still considered very masculine and unsafe
when it comes to workplace harassment. Only when you step into the field, do you
realize that these issues persist everywhere—it’s not just about engineering, or science.
It’s about how you move forward with it. The mission is to teach high-level skills to
more women, encourage their participation, and try to advocate for women already
present in these fields. At this point, we have five campus chapters, so we work with
a three-level model—working women in the professional fields, prospective engineers
and prospective graduate students, and then at the high school level. What happens
is, we try to involve them in a cycle—campus ambassadors from the universities in
Pakistan go to high schools and try to encourage girls when they are about to make
decisions. We have science competitions, and try to tell them it’s interesting if you
1 National University of Sciences and Technology, Islamabad, Pakistan
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want to pursue it. We also arrange seminars and conferences where we get the working
women in professional fields to come and provide software and industry-specific
training. At this point, we work towards training working women, to get them to rise
up in the organizational hierarchy, and talk to policy makers about all the issues that
might concern working women. These are all projects in the pipeline. Recently, we
have been involving students here at UB, by having them chat with middle school
students in Pakistan. It went on for three weeks, twice a week. Despite the time
difference there is, ten hours, we got amazing responses. The girls were supremely
excited to talk to people here. I remember reading the feedback from it, and one of
the girls had written, “Andrea, Tim, and Brian—these are names I had only seen in
story books, and never thought I’d be conversing with these people.” Initially, all the
girls had said they wanted to become doctors, because in Pakistan, medicine is the
noblest profession—you can do no wrong if you become a doctor. We asked them,
“That’s cool, but how do you think engineers can help you with that?” This progressed
in discussions about biomedical engineering, prosthetic instruments and devices, stem
cells, 3D printing, and Madame Curie; it just went off into a different spiral, and at the
end, all these girls had so many different ideas about what they want to pursue rather
than just being a doctor, and they seemed so passionate. I still get Facebook messages
like: “What was this water filtration project you were talking about?” or “Where can
I study biomedical engineering?”—questions that show that it really did help, just
having conversations. This conversation can, of course, be done by people there, but
not only did this discussion bridge the cultural gap, it also helped the kids come out
of their comfort zone and develop better communication skills, when they were trying
to communicate with us via email and Facebook. It helped them see how things move
forward in different countries. I think it was a wholesome experience for us and them
as well. This was a trial run—I had contacted my class fellows at UB, they mentioned
it to other people, and everyone got interested. It is only at UB right now. The plan is
to get more universities in the U.S. involved, we will see how that goes.
Z.T.: Do you feel UB was hospitable to your efforts? You gave a lot of talks on different issues. Was
the environment fruitful for the kind of work you are doing?
R.Q.: Certainly. UB has a lot of programs regarding gender, and they are very active
regarding progress as well. Also, at UB, there are a lot of people from South-East
Asia. A lot of people could relate to what I was saying, and wanted to help. It was
very useful, as far as reaching people is concerned. UB helped me go to the Society of
Women Engineers Conference, and before that, I was invited to workshops and talks
here, they featured me on the university website and were always helpful in trying to
get me connections. It’s amazing to see how ready people are to help.
Z.T.: One of these people was Jaganathan, can you tell us how the two of you met?
R.Q.: We are neighbors. Jagan is the sort of person who thrives in networking—
he loves meeting people. I don’t remember exactly how it happened, but we had a
conversation about the things I was doing. And one day I said, “You know what, I need
your help. I have this idea and I’m funding it with my student stipend at this point but
what happens when I go back? How do I sustain it? I have no clue.” And amazingly,
Jagan, in just half an hour, or an hour-long sitting, came up with a triangulated supply
chain, and I was just amazed at that because it made so much sense. We’ve been
friends ever since. Then, when the Blackstone LaunchPad started, I asked if I could
participate, and they were excited to have me there. We were talking about different
things concerning entrepreneurship—all this jargon I couldn’t really understand—
‘lean startup process,’ ‘user segmentation,’ ‘target market,’ all these kinds of terms, so
Jagan was my savior. I immediately contacted him—“Would you be so kind as to help
me?” And that was it—he said, “Of course!” It was amazing to see how ready he was.
Since he comes from a very similar culture, I’m pretty sure he does not underestimate
the challenge involved, and it was really heartening to see him take it on and live up to
it, coming up with ideas and owning up to them. The amount of compassion he has
for this cause is phenomenal.
Z.T.: Can we say then that this as a collaborative project between engineering and management?
R.Q.: Yes, I don’t think anything at this point can happen without STEM and
management, or STEM and the media working together. We live in a world of
technology, but I would not be able to make it by just being a civil engineer, I would
really need management, so in any task, there needs to be a collaborative effort for
sure.
Z.T.: Jagan, what inspired you to come to the U.S. for your Master’s?
J.R.: I wanted to study Supply Chain Management. There are no specialised Master’s
courses in India involving Supply Chain Management. What better place to study
Supply Chain Management than the biggest trader and supply chain manager in the
world—the U.S.
Z.T.: We know that historically, there has been tension between Pakistan and India. How did you
two overcome it?
R.Q.: Throughout the process of working together, we constantly come up with,
“Oh, do you have this in India, how do say that?,” and there are so many things in
common we never thought about. Living in Pakistan, we are more familiar with India
because of Bollywood and because we have a lot of relatives there; but India has a huge
population of its own, and a lot of people I met from there, generally speaking, aren’t
really familiar with Pakistan, apart from what the media presents, so I get interesting
questions, and it’s really nice to break the shackles of these stereotypes. How we work
is, there is so much in common, not just between our countries, but also between our
personalities. I think we can relate to it very easily, and, in the bigger picture, the
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tensions between our countries really seem miniscule.
Z.T.: Jagan, what motivated you to start helping Ramla with her cause?
J.R.: The world has two problems: poverty and illiteracy. By working on how to
alleviate poverty through my education and work experience, regarding fair/alternative
trade organizations around the world, I was only working to solve half of the world’s
problems. So when an opportunity came up where I could work with Ramla towards
solving illiteracy and her being at the very forefront of women’s education, I jumped
to take it. I owed it to myself to seize this opportunity.
Z.T.: How did your knowledge of management help? Were there any specific concepts, or viewpoints,
to get at the problem from a different angle?
J.R.: As Ramla just mentioned, this is about women engineers in Pakistan. What she
has been trying to develop for the past few months, is a professional management twist
to her endeavor, WEP. She wants to create a plan to make the organization financially
sustainable so it doesn’t have to completely rely on her contributions and donations
alone. As a student, she can obviously not contribute as much as she would like to.
We are working on a model where WEP gets funding from donations and charity, but
also acts as a regular business—selling products and services to customers for money.
Thus, it can rely on its own sources of funding, which can translate to bigger and
braver financial decision for WEP in the long run. This is precisely what we are trying
to do—create a for-profit model to make WEP self-sustainable.
Z.T.: You keep mentioning the Blackstone program, can you say more about that?
J.R.: Blackstone is an international financial service group; it came up with this concept
called “LaunchPad,” which incubates business ideas from budding entrepreneurs and
very selflessly encourages entrepreneurs to make their idea work, get their idea out
there, scale it up, and make it an actual business. They want to nurture a climate of
entrepreneurship. The Blackstone LaunchPad has one of its chapters in the Student
Union on the UB North campus. That’s where we’re going to be spending a lot of
time this summer, working on a model to scale up WEP and make it financially and
economically sustainable.
Z.T.: What are some milestones along the way of your project?
R.Q.: The Blackstone LaunchPad is collaborating with the Western New York
Incubator Network, but the name of the accelerator program we work in is the Buffalo
Student Sandbox. We started with elevator pitches and all of a sudden both of us
realized, oh wow, we need to figure out our finances, revenues, and target markets, and
competition, and that basically is our milestone right now.
Z.T.: And this is where management comes in handy?
J.R.: Yes, in fact, there is a lot to figure out, even for me as a management student.
Just yesterday we were working on a 10-minute pitch. When you start working with
these frameworks, you begin to understand, “Oh, I never had to do this,” so you
start realizing you didn’t have that deep of an understanding of your own business
to answer these questions. This is exactly what Professor William Hayden means by
“HDYK,” – How do you know? And this is what Blackstone is doing—they are taking
us to the water. I keep repeating this saying, “Give a man a fish, and you feed him
for a day; show him how to catch fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.” In essence,
Blackstone doesn’t help us manage our business, but teaches us relevant management
practices and principles so we can manage our business.
Z.T.: What are your expectations for the summer, regarding your project?
R.Q.: Incorporation and attracting investments.
Z.T.: Is the organization going to be not-for-profit?
R.Q.: This is an interesting question because at this point, we are at a question mark
about that as well. We are trying to decide whether we want to go non-profit, or do
we want to make our organization not as reliant on donations, since we are making
women self-sustainable. It’s something we need to figure out as we work through this
and since we get to listen to different entrepreneurs working on completely different
projects, it puts it in perspective. So, possibly, by the end of this program or maybe
even sooner, we will have an idea of exactly what we want to do, and be able to move
forward.
Z.T.: Ramla, are you planning on going back to Pakistan when your program is over?
R.Q.: At this point, yes. For now, I would say I want to work from there. I am applying
for to a Ph.D. program, but since I am not sure of the outcome yet, currently the plan
is to go back and work from Pakistan.
Z.T.: Jagan, if you go back to India, do you see a way to continue participating in the project from
there?
J.R.: One of the important things we are working on is to make the WEP model very
agile and adaptable, so you can take the business model and position it in another
country and still make it work. Since most of the countries in Southeast Asia are facing
similar challenges, it wouldn’t be very difficult to transform Women Engineers Pakistan
into Women Engineers Indonesia, India, Nepal, and so on. So, if this works well,
that could be one angle of the things we’re looking at—transferring it into Women
Engineers India. But as far as my contributions to WEP go, and how problematic
traveling between the two countries is presently, we are still deciding. The next eight
weeks will tell if it is possible. While the engineering department understands and
appreciates the need for business in Ramla’s social cause, the business school doesn’t
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understand businesses’ needs for social involvement. It’s all about tried and tested
methods where people become financial consultants or tech entrepreneurs. Also, I
feel that a lot of professors are not aware of the fact that you can take a not-for-profit
cause and make it into a for-profit business, and still make money, and teach about it
in the classroom, none of which is being done. In fact, there is a lot of chatter in the
business world about the concept of a social enterprise—a non-profit organization
with for-profit models that uses revenue and profits to reinvest into the business. This
is something the business school here should start understanding, appreciating, and
channeling into its classrooms before it’s too late.
R.Q.: Adding on to that, as I’m going through the Student Sandbox process, I realized
there is so much I don’t know. I don’t know how to pitch to investors, I am not aware
of the buzz words; this world of investment and venture capital is completely new
to me. Maybe the engineering school needs to teach something about business and
economics. In my undergraduate program in Pakistan, we were taught engineering
economics and entrepreneurship, so I thought I had an advantage, but I still feel the
need to do more.
Z.T.: If it wasn’t for the fact that the two of you are neighbors, do you think you would have met?
Is UB doing enough to bridge your disciplines?
R.Q: I met Jagan only this year, but I’ve been here for two years already, and I have
been trying to reach out to so many people, in the computer science department for
instance, so I could make a portal. It’s just difficult because everyone is busy and there
aren’t a lot of events and platforms where people from different departments could
meet and collaborate.
Z.T.: So, apart from your personal informal networks, you don’t feel there is a formal infrastructure
where people can start collaborative projects?
R.Q.: There are a lot of student associations and they do collaborate, but it really
doesn’t seem to work as well as we would like it to. Maybe interdepartmental events
could help. At this point, the only interdepartmental event that I have been a part of
has been with the mechanical engineering department; I was part of the GSA for
my department, and we did reach out to people, but at the end of the day, most of it
comes from your own informal network.
J.R.: No. Not yet. At least not yet here at UB. I think departments, at least the better
connected ones such as Engineering, Business, Literature, etc., face many challenges.
Business and engineering play a very equal game out there. An engineer needs to
understand business realities. After an M.B.A., if a student is moving into the
construction industry, she needs to understand the basics of engineering. But this
reality is not being addressed by the university. Sure, we have the option of cross-
departmental credits if the student has the time and motivation to go out of her way.
The university can address these aspects of time and motivation. After taking up
credits in the Law school last semester, beyond the mandatory 15 credits required
by the department, I realized that I did not have the time for these extra credits, nor
did I have the support system from friends and business school professors who were
all, understandably, doing their own things to get through the semester. I think of
another friend from Engineering who also didn’t feel engaged by the business school.
A civil engineering department should perhaps make it mandatory to have at least three
credits from the business school. In the business school on the other hand, a person
with a concentration in HR would and should benefit from classes in the psychology
department. With mandatory requirements, a compulsive ecosystem develops which
paves the way for organic and holistic support systems in touch with the global and
collaborative professional world out there.
R.Q.: Taking classes together will definitely help but then this could also be done
through events.
J.R.: The solution is a mix between being compelled and being proactive. If the
university can do its part and institute requirements of cross-departmental credits
and also club-participation, and if the students on the other side participate more by
being passionately curious and seeking out people, courses, and club events from other
departments, then this virtuous cycle will do great things for students, departments,
and UB overall.
R.Q.: At this point we are focused on one part of the world, but the problem definitely
escalates to a world-wide issue. UB has given me the opportunity to forge a lot of
connections.
J.R.: For my part, I personally cannot say that UB has been sufficiently incubatorial.
There can be a lot that can be achieved if the departments were a little more proactive
or interested in something beyond their curriculum. Part of why students are not
really interested in things beyond course requirements is because the coursework is
intensive. I expected this in my one-year Master’s course, but was dismayed at seeing
how people were overloaded right from the start of the semester until the very end.
This being the case even in two-year programs. While this gives you a very good
level of education as far as the academic side is concerned, it doesn’t give students a
chance to start respecting their own curiosity or grow, as much as one possibly can,
regarding the real-world side. Our education here at UB seems to be dictated more by
our timetable, than by our eagerness to learn. I’m not simply saying UB should give
fewer credits or reduce the course load, but that there should be more emphasis on
class participation, practical knowledge, and extracurricular involvement. This would
allow both students and faculty to broaden their horizons.
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