At 18, Urwa Hameed Is already a College Graduate and an Author
By Susan Dunne
Growing up in a small town in Pakistan where electricity and running water were scarce, Urwa Hameed had two things in abundance: energy and encouragement.
Both have served her well. This month, Hameed, now an 18-year-old Vernon resident, will graduate from Boston College, where she double-majored in political science and international studies and minored in business. From January to May, she will work with a nonprofit she founded, to help immigrants file their taxes. She has just published a book about women politicians in her native Pakistan. And she is studying for her Law School Admissions Test.
“I am a high-energy person. School is not enough for me. I always am doing something,” says Hameed.
Hameed graduated from Rockville High and started at Boston College when she was 15 and finished there in 3½ years, going to summer school, traveling the world, doing research for professors, participating in campus activism, and writing poetry in Urdu, one of four languages she knows fluently.
Hameed will get her diplomas in the traditional graduation ceremony in May, with her classmates.
Hameed made many friends at Boston College, despite at first not wanting to discuss what set her apart from everyone else on campus.
“I was hesitant to bring up my age. I didn’t want that to be the only lens through which people could look at me,” she says. “Very few people knew that I was that young.”
It is easy to believe Hameed is older than her years. Impressively intelligent, poised and confident, with a quick and precise manner of speaking, she gives off the air of an experienced professional woman.
Hameed’s drive to succeed began in her childhood in a rural town in the Multan province, in the Punjab region of Pakistan. Summer temperatures soared above 100 degrees, many had no electricity and drinkable water could be scarce.
“The desert was 20 minutes away. The groundwater was sour. There were filtration systems, but without electricity, you can’t use them,” she says.
In this atmosphere, Hameed grew up, admiring her father. He owned farmland, where wheat, mangos and cotton were grown. He also was an immigration attorney who traveled frequently in his work to the United States and Great Britain. As part of his work, he ran a pro bono legal clinic for the poor.
“He was a government advocate for ushr and zakat, which is a way of redistributing alms to the poor. Zakat is one of the five pillars of Islam,” she says. “He helped people file paperwork, get green cards.”
The importance of education was instilled in Hameed from a young age.
“It was very hard. The closest school was 2½ hours away” by bus, she says. “I had to go to Qur’an school, too. I got up early and wouldn’t get home until 10, 10:30 at night.”
As she got older, she moved to Islamabad, the country’s capital.
“My sister and I ... had to live there to get access to education,” she says. In Islamabad, she missed her family.
“The void was always there.”
Later, her father decided to bring his family to the United States. Then tragedy struck. Always sickly and often overworked, her father died while processing his family’s final immigration paperwork. The rest of Urwa’s family — her sister, her two brothers and their mother — went ahead with the plans to go to America. They settled in Vernon, where several of Hameed’s aunts lived.
Hameed’s education here got off to a rocky start.
“I was initially placed in Vernon Center Middle School. I was quite upset. I told my mother, this is really easy,” she says. “The math and English classes were teaching me things I had learned four years ago. I was intellectually unchallenged and frustrated.”
Later, she was pushed up two grades and finished at Rockville High before moving on to Boston College.
Hameed is fluent in Punjabi and Urdu. She can fluently read and write Arabic, which she learned in Qur’an school. She learned English in Pakistan, but didn’t become verbally fluent until emigrating.
“I never spoke to anyone in English there,” she says. She also speaks Saraiki, a Pakistani language, “at about 90%.”
“The tribe who worked on our farmland, they spoke it. My family interacted with them,” she says. Since coming to America, she has learned a bit of Spanish.
At Boston College, Hameed got a job and she did research for professors who were writing books. As a freshman, she traveled to the Balkans to study the philosophy of war and peace. She unsuccessfully ran for student body president and she advocated for Halal food and a mosque on campus.
She also traveled back to Pakistan three times to research her self-published book titled “Steering Toward Change: Women Politicians Challenging Patriarchy, Class and Power in Pakistan,” for which she interviewed and profiled 45 Pakistani women politicians.
“Every one of these women had to overcome a patriarchal culture to succeed. Politics is seen as the realm of men, where women are not welcome. They have to work every day to keep their space,” she says. “Women’s interests are not represented in politics. They have that urge to represent women.”
She was happy at Boston College, a Catholic school, although she is Muslim. The student body, about 9,000 people, has about 250 Muslims, she says.
“I am a practicing and believing Muslim. I was more comfortable being my religious self in a religious school than I would have been in a secular school,” she says.
Now she is preparing her next step. She may go to law school. If she doesn’t, she will enroll in a master’s program in international affairs. Remembering her days in Islamabad, she wants to stay close to home.
“I want to be close to the area, close to my family, somewhere in New York, Massachusetts or Connecticut,” she says. - Hartford Courant
