Reboot is not just a book, its a mindset I was introduced to when I first met Jawwad. A mindset with a dangerously high viral load, so be aware.

In Fall 2003, I took a fateful course that didn’t quite change the course of my life (much to the disappointment of my instructor), but did radically rewire my perspective. From the course outline, Bootstrapping New Ventures seemed like an innocuous course taught by a mild-mannered instructor, just like Reboot sounds like a mild bed time read written by a chubby, geeky 30-something author. Except the chubby, geeky 30-something part, you’d be wrong on all counts. Yes, the book is as engaging as the course, but no milder than the instructor who brazenly shouted a certain four letter word in class, and unembarrassed, continued on.

If you’re in college or if you’re ten years into your plumbing career, feeling uninspired, edging towards a quarter life crisis, one thing I’ll guarantee is that Reboot will inspire you. Sometimes it takes a story of failure to jolt you out of your golden hand-cuffs.

Every time  I come to Pakistan, things seem worse. This time Shahid Masood was crooning about his ‘minus 1′  theory, Geo was adding the usual fuel in hope of a fire, and each “analyst” was making apocalyptic predictions. Each time, when I think the prevalent mood can’t get any more despondent, and the analysts any more hysterical, I’m surprised.

But you know what, if the millions of the drawing-room analysts who find excuses to despair had the chance to be there at the PASHA APICTA Awards yesterday then it would challenge the despondent world-view that they are so sucked up in.

I have seen numerous business plan competitions in Pakistan over the past 4-5 years. Each time, I left disappointed, seeing only half-baked dotcoms, but this week, I was blow away. What do the following have in common:

• The first 3-D multiplayer cricket game with visuals so stunning that I have to calm my heart-beat every time I see them
• A location based service to serve events, classifieds and posts to ignite the flame of activity and excitement in metropolis once known as the city of lights
• A net-flix for books that has been profitable from Day 1 making books available and affordable
• An android gaming platform that is one of the fastest growing in the Andriod marketplace
• A medical platform to help prevent epidemics in rural villages

There are all Made in Pakistan by kids who are as smart and as driven as the best I’ve seen.  I will write about most of these startups later, but for now, let it be known there is hope. And a generous outpouring of it.

-Adnan

SZABIST had great potential when it was founded. It was the brain-child of a prime minister (BB), was being led by an accomplished academic (Dr. Laghari), had a generous endowment (speculated to be $20m), a satellite campus in the city, and massive land allotment on the outskirts of Karachi (2,200 acres). This is going to be the next GIK is what people thought. Bombarded by a formidable marketing campaign, parents and students actually believed the hype, however, the industry was skeptical.

The strategy of SZABIST seems to have been more focused on generating headlines, rather than creating impact. What makes an institute outstanding? Quality faculty, quality students and quality research which is essentially a by-product of the first two. Does it matter that the university has a radio station, an isp, a software house, and mediocre campuses in Dubai and Islamabad?   In my opinion, opening multiple campuses was one of the gravest mistakes made by the management. Rather than focusing energy and resources to improve academic quality and research facilities in the main campus, they rushed to set up campuses that diluted the value of an already fragile brand. The reputation of SZABIST Dubai and Islamabad is so egregiously poor that I try to avoid the subject of my undergraduate degree altogether when I’m in those two cities.

So in Fall 2001, when I resumed the semester at SZABIST  life was great socially, especially after the seclusion of PIEAS. I was in Karachi, hanging out with old friends and meeting people with whom I clicked.  Academically, however, it was a mixed bag.

In the thirty or so courses I took at zabist, I can only recall 4 that were taught by instructors who had the ability to engage, challenge and motivate. Logic and Scientific Enquiry by Dr. Shabbir Ahsan, MIS by Zeeshan Arshad, Introduction to Business by Faisal Abdullah, and Bootstrapping Business Ventures by Jawwad Farid.

There was one entire final year course, titled Multimedia Systems, that focused on making pretty 3D Max models and another loftily titled “Research Report” in which students were expected to choose a topic, plagiarise, reformat and submit. Marking was based on how even the indentation was. And of course, how can I forget the full 1 semester course on photoshop and freehand!?! If this was the curriculum for Al Khair or Preston, I would understand. But for an institute that markets itself as the leading SciTech school in Asia?

SZABIST had a two sided dilemma. Often the teachers weren’t qualified enough to challenge the students, and the students weren’t driven enough to challenge the teachers.  Students objected vociferously to any proposed addition to the course outline. Lessons were not about gaining knowledge, but about memorizing enough to crack the hourlies (mid terms). The instructors who did have deep expertise in their subjects didn’t seem too inclined to push the students beyond their lazy comfort zones.

The academic quality of szabist while better than many institutes in Karachi didn’t compare with the likes of GIK, NUST, PIEAS or LUMS. More pointedly, the academic quality fell far short of the expectations szabist built by its unrestrained marketing prowess.

For a fair assessment, however, one has to see what the alumni from the BCS program are doing 5 years on, and this is where szabist has done well. We entered into a hostile job market in which szabist was considered  a tier-2 institute, and most newspaper  job ads precluded consideration by specifying that only LUMS, GIK, NUST and IBA graduates were invited to apply. Despite these limitations, if I compare my batch (BCS 2003) with computer science students who graduated roughly at the same time from IBA and FAST, then in terms of salary and career progression my peers from SZABIST seem to be comparable.

So why did my batch do so well?

Because the student intake was of a higher quality as  a direct result of the marketing blitz by SZABIST in the late 90s. But also because the SZABIST curriculum put a strong focus on presentation, writing and business skills. By the time a typical student graduated, he could write effectively and confidently present to a crowd. This meant that in business, especially, technology businesses, SZABIST BCS grads did well. Of course, they couldn’t solve equations or write code, hence only a handful went into technical careers.

-Adnan

Tired of seeing me sad and miserable, my mom arranged for me to take a few courses at zabist to test the waters. I don’t remember exactly, but there was some quirk in the first year schedule at PIEAS that allowed me a couple of months to try out szabist, without quitting from PIEAS. Why zabist? Because it was the only decent institute in Karachi that accepted transfer students. The only other option was KIIT, a tier-3 excuse for a university.

ZABIST looked good on paper. A long list of PhDs on the faculty, an 1800 acre campus under construction just outside the city, a research journal and an in-house software house. Cajoled by family and several close friends I decided to give it a shot. There was nothing to lose except the tuition fees, and considering that I was on a 75% merit scholarship at PIEAS, I had enough cash to spare. And so I enrolled as a reluctant transfer student at Zabist.

I don’t remember the mix of courses I took in my first semester at zabist, but my first impressions were: courses are too easy, students don’t want to study, course outlines are not covered, teachers aren’t sufficiently experienced or qualified. Most instructors were recent graduates, from either szabist, or institutes that weren’t much better (NED, IBA, FAST). There were three of us in our class who were smarter than several teachers who taught us in the first two semesters. (Digression: One of them left szabist after year 1, and started over at LUMS because he couldn’t take it any more; he is now at Harvard. The other I’ve lost touch with.) Its not because we were geniuses (sorry Ahmed), but because the faculty wasn’t sufficiently qualified to engage us and the students had committed themselves to a vow of taking it easy.

So when my summer break at PIEAS was about to end, I had to decide between a rock and a very hard place. I headed back to PIEAS as ambivalent as ever. Swaying from extreme to the other. I met with the key faculty, and they frowned at the prospect of me considering zabist. I saw the fresh batch that came in subjected to churlish bullying more fitting to a rural cadet college, than an esteemed center for higher learning. Frustrated and put off, when the time came, I decided that I couldn’t take more of the same for another 3 years. These were the best years of my life, and I had to enjoy them.

I was consoled by reasoning that since zabist was in the city, it would lead to greater opportunity, and more exposure to business. Plus the szabist brand was much better known than PIEAS, and the deep knowledge I would gain staying in PIEAS could still be learnt if I studied hard enough on my own initiative. After that moment of clarity, I walked into Dr. Mutawarra’s office, less to tell him what I had decided than to get his approval and blessing. Within a few minutes of telling him, I was being walked to the rector’s office. Dr. Abdullah Saddiq was the head of PIEAS, and a very highly regarded academic. After his tenure at PIEAS, he took over as rector in GIK. Dr. Mutawarra explained the situation to him, and requested Dr. Abdullah to guide me. I don’t remember the exact discussion now, but he recounted the academic opportunities at PIEAS, but also added that quality of life was important and the final decision was obviously mine. What I distinctly remember though is that he had the highest regard for Dr. Leghari, and saw great potential in his projects.

That evening I packed up my bags, and the next day, after saying awkward good-byes, took a minivan to the station in Pindi.

I was in the first batch of undergraduate students ever inducted into PIEAS. Until this historical opening of PIEAS to the world, it was providing top-notch engineering education to officers of the atomic energy commission. To maintain its venerable reputation, PIEAS ran for fresh graduate program inductees a “zero-semester” to weed out those who did not have the stamina and intellectual vitality to remain. Only those who survived moved on to the first semester.

For undergraduate students, the policy was to boot students whose GPAs would fall below 2.5 for two successive semesters. That all undergraduates were self-funded did not lead to any leniency. PIEAS didn’t want to make money from undergrads, it wanted to produce a crop of engineers so formidable that they could compete with the top-talent across the world. Out of a batch of 40, 2 were made to leave in the first semester, and 4 more at the end of the second. That’s when I lost track.

I found the academic environment at PIEAS nurturing, especially after the mind-numbing curriculum of FSc. Calculus wasn’t about area under the curve, discrete math wasn’t about permutations, physics wasn’t about f=ma. It was all about application. Each faculty member had enough depth to relate these abstract concepts to real life applications.

I was taught physics by the soft-spoken Dr. Anwar Majid Mirza, an Imperial College PhD, who is ranked as the 4th most productive scientist in Pakistan. Taught by him, the dizzyingly complex problems of speed, motion, current and dielectrics were fun and engaging. The head of the computer science department at the time, Dr. Mutawarra Hussien, taught us Object Oriented Programing – I. The concepts of abstraction, encapsulation and inheritance I learned from him, meant that I could sleep through most programming courses at zabist, getting an A in each one.

While I loved the academic rigour of PIEAS, I was very unhappy there. PIEAS was largely unprepared to address the social (and psychological) needs of 18 year olds stepping out of their homes for the first time. In their 30-year history, they had never dealt with kids straight out of high school. Mid-way through the first semester, half the class would still rise when the professor walked in, and be tempted to sing “As salam alaikum teacher”.

To compound this problem, PIEAS was one hour from Islamabad and civilization. While most kids would take the bus service to Islamabad on weekends, I used to stay on campus, not particularly eager to loiter around Blue Street.  I felt very isolated socially. Most of my peers, while outstanding academically, came from a rural background. I can only think of 3 other people with a background similar to mine, the urban, liberal (English speaking?) type. Two of them were girls, which meant speaking with them was off-limit in the suffocating social climate of PIEAS.

By the end of the second semester, I felt insulated, miserable and lonely. The allure of lofty academics started to dull when faced with the pain of being  in a rigid, incompatible social environment. That I hadn’t fully recovered from the jaundice I had contracted the spring  before, and remained consistently unwell didn’t help. After two rough semesters, summer was there to rescue me. I happily hopped onto the third-class cabin in Khyber Mail headed to Karachi.

-Adnan

I often get asked by concerned parents about where they should send their kids when they finish high school (FSc or A-levels). Most recently, it was my chacha asking me if he should send his daughter to szabist. The cousin in question goes to one of the most selective school for girls in Karachi and has ranked  in the top 10% of her class since primary school. SZABIST may not be the right institute for her.

Now that I’ve made a potentially controversial statement, rest assured that I’ll add lots of fuel to the fire. Let me first say, however, these opinions are written with hindsight and the colored lens of memory and experience. They are not meant to be objective. If you disagree with what I’ve written, then comment away.

Before I write about the two and a half years that I spent at SZABIST, I have to tell you about the institute where I started my undergraduate education. Located a good 1 hour away from Islamabad, in a maximum security district, flanked by mountains on one side, and nuclear reactors on another, was the idyllic campus where I studied “Computing Fundamentals”.

-Adnan