The Identity, Culture, and Languages category welcomes submissions that focus on exploring elements of identity, culture, or languages, through the written word. This category seeks writing that investigates the human experience, particularly through perspectives that are frequently marginalized or excluded, which may include members of the LGBT+ community, people with disabilities, non-citizens, and multilingual writers. Submissions are open to projects written in any course, at any level. There are no length limits for this category. Mustafa Hakeem wrote the 2nd place submission in the Identity, Cultures, and Languages category for the 2025 President’s Writing Awards.
About Mustafa
I’m a proud Arab American who came to the U.S. as a refugee in search of a better future. I’m currently finishing my degree in Finance and Business Administration. Along the way, I’ve been fortunate to complete multiple internships, lead student organizations, and give back to my community. My journey has been shaped by resilience, opportunity, and the people who believed in me. I hope my story encourages others to keep moving forward, no matter where they begin.
Winning Manuscript – Defining Your Expectations
Growing up, I often heard stories about our old life in Iraq: the joy, struggle, resilience, grief, and, the pursuit of a better future than the one we had. Once the invasion of Iraq took place in early 2003, my parents believed it would be best for us to pack our belongings and find a new home to raise us. We relocated to Istanbul for about a year waiting for the United Nations office to grant us a permanent new move, which ended up being Boise, Idaho. To my parents, this seemed like the best path to get us out of poverty and give us a chance to avoid being products of a crooked system. Along with a few pieces of luggage and cherished memories, my parents took with them the weight of high expectations from their families, friends, and society. As their child, I naturally inherited these expectations from being raised in America. However, as I grew older, I became aware that living a meaningful life isn’t based on achieving expectations placed upon you, it’s about defining your own expectations by pursuing your passions and choosing which needs you fulfill.
From a very young age, I began to understand that being an immigrant student held various expectations from numerous people. The cliches are very true, in the eyes of immigrant parents, you are either to be a doctor, engineer, lawyer, or a failure. Anything with great financial stability and respect from society is what you strive for. This seemed to be a blessing and a curse. The blessing of having a clearly defined path carved out for you from a young age and the curse of being expected to fully commit to that path, regardless of what life throws at you. The path of going to college, earning a degree or two, working a respectable stable job, and helping ensure our future generations don’t go through the same struggle. This one path is what success and fulfillment seemed to be based upon.
I mean, how could you not feel that pressure? There seemed to always be an unspoken assumption that my siblings and my “bright futures” would make up for the sacrifice that my parents endured. The sacrifice of leaving everything they ever knew and loved behind, in hopes of us gaining a better education and opportunities than the ones they were granted. Before the 2003 Iraq War began, my mother was studying to become a professor in her second year at University. She was very passionate about learning, the stories I would hear growing up of my mother studying for hours, and always reading, to the point where my grandparents had to force her out of her room so she could take a break from schoolwork for a little bit. My mother’s dream was always to teach the younger generation and help give back the love she grew up with in her community. When my mother’s dream was cut short by war and relocating, my siblings and I became the next hope for reaching that academic success. College wasn’t a question, it was the only option.
Growing up with foreign parents who couldn’t learn English fast enough, one of the main responsibilities my siblings and I had was to translate English to Arabic, fill out paperwork, and help my parents navigate through the unknown of a foreign country. What benefited us is that we began schooling at an early age, which helped us pick up English quickly. As I watched my parents navigate through life in a new country, I lived through their ups and downs. After a short time of being in America, my parents would receive all of these targeted promotional ads that invited them to apply for many different credit cards. All of these warm invitations and small gifts convinced them to open up these cards to help furnish our new home as they gradually paid it off. What wasn’t so clear in the promotional ads was the extremely high interest rates, legal jargon, and unrealistic monthly payments that they would owe. This began to financially cripple my parents as they were navigating the early stages of our new life.
This led to many arguments, anger, and confusion with credit card companies. This made me feel helpless as a child and wish there was some way that I could contribute to their solutions. As soon as I was legally able to, I began to work multiple different part-time jobs while in school. All to help my parents during their time of need. As they began to slowly pay off their debt, I began to discover my passion in the financial world. I started studying basic financial literacy outside of school to try and help educate my parents, eventually creating and managing my mother’s brokerage account while in high school. I began to use my true passion for finance to help others become financially literate and start setting up their future goals. What started as a way to help my parents evolved into a deeper passion. I found fulfillment in assisting others toward financial stability. Soon, I was helping guide friends and extended family members with their finances. This is what truly made me pursue a career in finance and pushed me to my career goal of becoming a financial analyst.
All of these lessons up to this point led my siblings and me to fully commit to college without ever talking about the slight chance of pursuing an alternative path in life. At that point, mentioning not attending university seemed like a sin. I remember during middle school, I joined a college and career readiness program that helped teach students about different career paths.
One day, our teacher brought in a Tradesman to speak about his journey. How he was uncertain after high school, became trade-certified, and eventually ran an extremely successful business in his field. He was so successful that our teacher would rave about the lifestyle that he and his wife lived. But then, at the end of this amazing presentation, the Tradesman ended his speech by mentioning that college isn’t for everyone. This was the first time I’ve ever heard something like this from a person. It almost felt offensive, was he saying that success could exist outside of higher education? Did he not want us to succeed? As I grew older and began to gain more in-depth experiences in different professions and meet people from all walks of life, I understood what he meant. Success isn’t about following a predefined path, it’s about defining your own expectations based on your passions and choosing what to prioritize in life.
Being the youngest of three, I always looked up to my older brother and sister and hoped to follow in their footsteps as I navigated life. My older brother was the first to graduate high school and was on track to attend college. Around the time of his high school graduation, my parents divorced which led us to be taken care of fully by our newly single mother. With this extra weight on my mother’s shoulders, my brother decided to take a gap year after high school and work to help support my mother until she figured out her new life. After a year or so, my brother began his college journey.
At that time, my sister now graduated high school and was set to pick her future career path. After deep consideration, my sister mentioned to me that she wanted to become an esthetician and attend a beauty school program. I was happy that she had picked what she found joy in, but I was very unsure of how my parents would handle the news. After my sister gathered up the courage to break the news to my parents, we were pleasantly surprised by their reaction. My mother mentioned that “if this path was going to make her the happiest in life, then she should take it without looking back.” She also mentioned to us that following a path with no passion is meaningless. In my eyes, it seemed as if my sister had broken the unspoken obligation of attending a university. This moment in my life is closely tied to a quote from “What Makes a Life Significant?” by William James, “We have unquestionably a great cloud bank of ancestral blindness weighing down upon us, only transiently riven here and there by fitful revelations of the truth” (James, 3). James is referencing that many of us inherit beliefs and traditions from previous generations which naturally shape the way we see the world. Sometimes without ever thinking twice about them. Until somebody like my sister comes along and has a moment of clarity and courage to change things.
Her decision, however, came with lots of criticism and judgment from our extended family. With comments about my sister “wasting her potential” by taking on an alternative career path that doesn’t promise success like a conventional path would. It dawned on me that the strict expectations I had internalized were, in many ways, self-imposed to please my parents. When I learned that my parent’s true expectation of us was to find happiness, I felt a wave of relief mixed with anxiety. Finding my happiness seems a lot harder than following a traditional path. But I fully felt freedom in my decision to take up anything I was interested in.
It became clear that not everyone fits this cookie-cutter mold of what a successful person is supposed to look like. People in my life can have all of these expectations of where I’m supposed to be, what they would do in my position, and the opportunities that are granted to me, but they would never be in my shoes. This awareness reshaped my perspective on expectations. I no longer saw expectations as goals placed on me by others, but as opportunities I could define for myself. My life’s meaning didn’t just come from achieving so-called “success”, it came from addressing real needs in the world and using my abilities to make a positive impact.
My journey to becoming a financial analyst isn’t based on solely having a stable career, but on fulfilling a purpose I truly believe in. As Oliver Burkeman stated in his article, The Eight Secrets to a Fairly Fulfilled Life, “The only viable solution is to make a shift: from a life spent trying not to neglect anything to one spent proactively and consciously choosing what to neglect, in favor of what matters most” (Burkeman, 2). Whether that means using college to advance your career, mentoring students, working a trade, or even pursuing an unconventional path as my sister did, meaning comes from choosing what makes you feel the most fulfilled.
Citations
Burkeman, Oliver. The Eight Secrets to a Fairly Fulfilled Life. The Guardian, 2020, neuroself.wordpress.com. Accessed [Feb 16, 2025].
James, William. What Makes a Life Significant? Lander University, philosophy.lander.edu. Accessed [Feb 18, 2025].