Sadia Tasnim

Professor Sidibé

English 110

4 February 2019

Formal Letter of Introduction

My name is Sadia Tasnim. I am a Bengali-American Muslim. My first name comes from the woman who cared for the Prophet Muhammad when he was a child, Halimatus Saadia. My last name comes from the arabic for ‘fountain in heaven’. I was the first child in my family and naturally, my parents forgot to give me the family last name (Bari) so I am the only member of my family with the last name, Tasnim.

The members of my family that have had the most influence on my upbringing are my mother and my grandmother, though I somehow ended up as a female version of my father. My grandmother did her best to raise me with good values and teach me everything she knew about Islam. My mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia shortly after I was born. I spent a long time trying to understand my religion in relation to mental illness in relation to Bengali culture and I am still working on figuring out how to exist at the crossroads of all three. I have and am still figuring out how much of me is a direct result of trauma and how much of me is who i am without it. Growing up this way has also given me an interest in activism and I have participated in social justice clubs, organized walkouts and protests, and other events of the sort.

In elementary school, I was one of those trademark bookworms, falling asleep with a book tented over my face. My mother used to take my books away before I went to sleep so I wouldn’t stay up to finish one. As I got older, my reading habit did decrease but I find myself grateful for the reading I did as a child. When I entered high school, I discovered that I loved writing poetry when I desperately tried out for every activity I could to get onto a competitive team and poetry was the category I managed to get myself into. I competed in poetry contests throughout my high school career and have seen some of my closest friends become poets and spoken word artists in their own right. It has become something that will always hold a special place in my heart. I also got into beatboxing through the same competition community.

My major is Biomedical Engineering. I have always been interested in science and I consider myself a creative person so I opted for something that could combine both of those things. I often find myself conflicted over whether I would find myself loving what I do when all of my hobbies tend to be in the humanities or social sciences. But since I am a freshman and the engineering program is so difficult to transfer into, I thought I would apply as a freshman and if I figured out that I wanted to change, I could do that more easily than trying to transfer in later on. Ideally, I would have a job in engineering and volunteer on the side as an activist or social worker is what I used to think. Now though, I am thinking about what really made me want to go into engineering and that maybe, it wasn’t because I truly wanted to do it, but because I wanted to be able to label myself as an engineer. Though I do have and always will have an interest in the sciences, I am finding it more and more apparent that perhaps a career in communications or marketing would be where I would be most comfortable. I am still in the process of making that decision.

Knowing my family’s financial situation, I knew that I would most likely end up at  CUNY school, which I never minded. CCNY was my first choice because of the Muslim community as well as the Grove School of Engineering. Both have been welcoming and encouraging so far. CCNY’s other schools also seem promising and I am grateful that there are other great programs so close at hand.

I have never been the kind of person with a clear, ambitious goal, but as I find myself understanding more of my upbringing and the environment I had to live in, I think I will be able to be that kind of person one day. My goals are getting clearer day by day, my ability to be vulnerable in front of others is growing better, and I am realizing just how much I limit myself by constraining myself to past fears, doubts, and goals. College has especially helped me in this respect because it has made me more independent and more of my future relies directly on my decisions.