Abstract
The peer interview was our first assignment and the most nerve-wracking for me. The goal of the assignment was to interview a peer and create a narrative out of it. My interviewing process started off with asking Ishrat Jahan basic information about herself; such as her age, ethnicity, and so on. Eventually, I moved on to her passions and goals and decided to focus my paper on her beliefs on culture and the education system. This assignment taught me the fundamentals of interviewing and how complicated it can be; trying to drive someone towards a topic without them noticing is a very difficult thing to do, and the responsibility that comes with creating a narrative can feel suffocating. Nonetheless, I enjoyed writing this paper almost as much as I enjoyed meeting Ishrat!
A Teachable Passion
When I first spoke to Ishrat Jahan, I was shocked to find weird markings on the wall behind her. I was even more shocked when I discovered that those markings were part of her identity. Ishrat exuded confidence, she is a young 21-year-old with a wide variety of passions. We spoke at great length about her interests and dreams along with her journey through CCNY. Ishrat was a biology major and chose to switch to a teaching major around halfway through her education. She explained to me that while she enjoyed pursuing Biology, she felt that it would have been too difficult for her and decided to switch to something she felt more passionate about. I asked her if being a teacher was something she was genuinely interested in, turns out not only was it an interest, it was also a cause. Ishrat told me that in schools, some teachers put too much pressure on young students which leads to them losing their curiosity to learn. Her goal was to become a teacher and change this, at least in her classroom. She wanted to make sure that the young students who went through her class left with their internal fire still burning.
At some point, Ishrat also told me that she loves finger painting and would like to be a painter while teaching. The dots started connecting, the markings on her wall now resembled paint, but this only created more questions. How could someone who has such a fiery passion, and the confidence to sit in front of a “messy” wall when meeting someone for the first time, have so much self-doubt that they switched majors out of a fear of failing? My initial guess was familial pressure. Perhaps her parents had pressured her into trying to become a part of the medical field. With this thought in mind, I tried to lead her into describing her relationship with her family, without making her upset or offended. She told me she lived with her parents and two younger siblings, a brother, and a sister. From what I was able to pull from her, she had a strong familial bond and trusted her family wholeheartedly. While this was a good thing, it might have meant that Ishrat had self-confidence issues. During our call she was biting her hand from time to time and didn’t maintain eye contact, however, this could always be chalked up to being nervous about meeting someone for the first time. Thankfully I didn’t need to do much guesswork, Ishrat told me that her biggest fear was failure, and when I asked her to describe herself, she said, “i’m a pretty person and I sometimes feel lost in my work, I’m in between having confidence in my work and needing guidance and help.” I finally felt that I understood Ishrat, she is a confident young person with very creative hobbies and a want to change the world. However, she feels challenged by her self-doubt and is still trying to break out of her shell.
Eventually we spoke again, this time through a video call in which I brought in new questions to try to uncover more from her. When I asked her about her culture, her eyes became excited and there was a smile on her face. I had assumed she was South-Asian due to her features, name, and accent but needed confirmation. She associated herself with Bengali culture and to my shock, was even able to comfortably answer hard-hitting questions, such as “Are there any flaws in your culture, if so, how would you change them.” She connected her answers back to teaching; similar to how there was too much pressure on students, she felt that some aspects of her culture also put too much pressure on people.
While I believed that I understood Ishrat, the environment she grew up in and the people she surrounded herself with were still a mystery. As I suspected, she immigrated to America as a young teenager where she met some of her closest friends. Prior to this, she grew up in a place called Feni in Bangladesh and had most of her childhood memories there. She also elaborated on her closest friend, a boy named Mihrab, who she described as reliable, honest, and relatable as they shared the same culture. Her voice sounded happier when she told me stories about their friendship, such as when all trains heading to her home were delayed and he picked her up late at night without complaint.
She seemed enamored with her friends and family, the people in her circle were good. Out of curiosity, I asked her if she could confidently say that she trusted the people in her life wholeheartedly, her reply was eye-opening to who she was as a person, “hopefully yes because trust is the main thing you leave on in life.” As I concluded my interview with Ishrat, I noticed the markings on her wall again, but this time they represented something different. Her wall had become a canvas, one that she would paint with her life experiences and identity, and those “weird” markings now looked like the first strokes of a paintbrush.