Moving to Halifax from her home city of Dhaka, Bangladesh in 2014 to do a master鈥檚 in urban planning at AV俱乐部 was a difficult but welcome change for Shaila Jamal.
What made the move so hard was that it meant spending an extended period apart from her husband, whom she had just married the year before. The decision was also culturally challenging.
鈥淚n our culture, this is a very odd thing actually,鈥� says Shaila. 鈥淵ou are not supposed to leave your husband to go abroad alone. I had two family members who were not happy about my decision.鈥�
Her husband, on the other hand, fully supported her decision to study abroad and followed her over to Halifax a year and a half later in the fall of 2015.
Shaila saw studying abroad as a way for her to expand her knowledge and advance her career in urban planning. Although she鈥檇 spent more than three years working in the field in Dhaka on climate-change issues with low-income communities and on pollution-reducing improvements in brick-making technologies, she had failed to find opportunities in her primary area of interest: transportation.
Connecting people and places
Shaila began exploring schools in Canada as she had heard positive things about the country鈥檚 cultural diversity. When she dug a bit deeper into Dal鈥檚 program offerings in the School of Planning, she found even further incentive when she connected with professor Ahsan Habib. In addition to sharing similar research interests, Shaila discovered Dr. Habib had also done his undergraduate studies at the University of Bangladesh.
Soon after arriving at Dal with several scholarships, Shaila began a job as a research assistant in Dr. Habib鈥檚 (DalTRAC) research group. Over the past two years at DalTRAC, they have worked on three papers together, including one based on her master鈥檚 research about how smartphone use impacts trip planning in Halifax. She recently presented the findings in Washington, D.C. at one of the largest transportation planner conferences in the world.
While at DalTRAC, Shaila also had the chance to work on a project looking into the factors that influence Haligonians鈥� use of active transportation such as bikes and walking. That research recently helped her land a job as a research and statistics officer with the Nova Scotia Health Authority鈥檚 Healthy Communities Unit.
For Shaila, the challenges of transitioning her family to Halifax (where she鈥檇 like to stay) have been more than worth it. 鈥淚 don鈥檛 feel gender discrimination at all when I am working somewhere,鈥� she says of her experiences in Halifax. 鈥淭hat has made me confident.鈥�