The Classroom That Changed My Life, The Country That Made It Possible

A letter to Harvard — and a reminder of what America still can be.

There was a time — not too long ago — when I stood in Orlando with a history degree and no history to make.

My marriage had ended. My sense of direction, too.

I was spiritually adrift. Culturally unsatisfied. I was working odd jobs. Waiting — not for opportunity, but for something even rarer: conviction. That maybe, just maybe, this country could still mean what it said in its founding documents. That maybe, just maybe, I could still become something in it.

And then — I did something simple. I registered for a course.

That course would lead me to Harvard Hall, Room 101. To professors like Jeffrey Rollert. To lectures on modern presidential politics. To questions bigger than any single party could answer. And more importantly, to people — students, faculty, staff — who believed in a vision of America that didn't begin with cynicism, and didn't end with apathy.

Because the liberal arts education at Harvard isn't a doctrine. It's a discipline. It's not a dogma. It's a duty — to always be thinking, questioning, bettering.

I got my cousin, Syed Umar Ahmed, into the Harvard Extension School — and paid for it myself. He now works at Verisel, a Fortune 500 company. His fiancée was the only female from Turkey admitted to Harvard that year. They met at Leverett Hall.

I founded Ivy League Consulting. I began working with the Phillips Brooks House Association. I taught English to newly arrived Vietnamese immigrants. I was being paid $50 an hour and still somehow felt I was the student in every classroom I entered. I even began consulting students from the Harvard Undergraduate Foreign Policy Initiative.

But what struck me more than the classrooms was the irony:

While I was a student — completely enthralled in a world that none of my fellow Orlandoans even knew existed — I was already passing that knowledge on. I was meeting with the head of Orange County Public Schools. I was briefing city council members. I was showing them the magic that was right there in front of us. I said, let's send the most students to Harvard out of any county in Florida. Let's use what exists but isn't yet known.

There was no precedent. There was no paperwork. I created it out of thin air.

That's what Harvard let me do. That's what America let me do.

A Letter in a Time of Challenge

Recently, I was invited by Crimson Courage — Harvard Alumni for Academic Freedom — to add my voice to a letter defending the university's independence. I wrote not just as an alumnus, but as someone whose life was made possible by the very freedom they now seek to protect.

What I wrote was not political. It was personal. It was about something deeper than any administration or any moment in time. It was about the American idea that ordinary people — flawed, searching, unfinished — can still become extraordinary citizens when institutions refuse to close their doors.

That is the America I was given. And it is the America I am committed to building for others.