How the path was made

For a long time the phrase “women’s rights” unsettled Mayesha. She wondered why women needed a separate category to be treated as human. Growing up in Bangladesh, that question became harder to ignore. She saw expectations placed on women that were treated as ordinary even when they narrowed choice.

She argued with family and friends. For a while she believed people might change. By 18 she understood the problem reached financial independence, support, and freedom of choice — not only individual opinions. She started an e-learning initiative so women could learn income-generating skills, and she founded Women Opportunities so they could share information and stand with one another. That community is currently paused. She may return to it later.

Trying to build those ideas taught her something harder: caring deeply about a problem did not mean she knew how to solve it. She lacked the experience needed for lasting change. That realization shaped the decision to study abroad on scholarship. She left because she wanted to become stronger first. She still describes herself as halfway there.

When Mayesha decided to study abroad, she wanted to do it herself. She searched, compared, and learned the process the long way. Then COVID-19 shifted everything.

She ran into a system that was confusing and often designed to extract money rather than explain a path. Agencies sold dreams without enough accountability. Students were left unsure of the next step.

She applied on her own. She was accepted to Tallinn University of Technology and chose Tokyo International University instead, on a full-tuition scholarship for Digital Business and Innovation.

Mayesha moved to Japan in April 2022 on a full-tuition scholarship.

The first semester was during COVID-19. She had to find accommodation, complete administrative procedures, and begin learning Japanese in a new environment. Those circumstances affected her Japanese 1A and 1B grades. From the second semester onward, her academic performance improved.

She later worked part-time in Japanese convenience stores, which required customer service, cash handling, and daily Japanese. The job was not a career destination. It was how she learned the language of ordinary life.

Mayesha learned Japanese through four years of study, work, teaching, and daily life. She now describes her proficiency as advanced.

Language here is not a credential line. It is how she found out what it feels like to be the person who does not yet understand the room — and later, the person who can translate a room for someone else.

When she arrived, there was no Bangladeshi student association. She founded one, helped incoming students, and organized cultural festivals for four years.

She also founded a data science and analytics community for students who wanted a more organized way into the field than an interdisciplinary major allowed. Getting the club approved required months of paperwork and interviews in Japanese and English. The university created a new category for educational activities and made the club its first member.

Both communities came from the same habit: if the structure is missing, try to build it.

Before undergraduate study, Mayesha kept asking what would still matter in twenty years. That question pulled her toward data science and into Digital Business and Innovation.

At TIU she worked as an undergraduate research assistant under Professor Parag Kulkarni from November 2023 to March 2026, contributing to NLP, text mining, summarization, knowledge graphs, and academic writing. She later initiated an automated essay-scoring project. From August 2024 to July 2025 she was a teaching assistant / student assistant for Foundations of Python and IT Project Management, supporting classes of up to 150 students from more than 120 countries.

Between July 2024 and November 2025 she completed HarvardX’s Data Science Professional Certificate, which strengthened her statistics, R, and machine-learning foundation.

The study-abroad process that had confused her became the problem she started to build around. AbroadMates came from the need to talk to someone who had already lived the path — her own note dates that start to 2022. ApplicationMate came later, from the scatter of documents, deadlines, and reusable information.

From October 2025 she has been co-founder of The Abroad Company. The parent company now holds both products, and she leads an 11-person distributed team.

The pattern is the same: she notices a difficult system, then tries to make a tool or a community that helps other people move through it.

The more she built, the more the interesting questions were about people. Making a feature work is one thing. Making it understandable — and knowing when it is trusted, ignored, or confusing — is another.

Her NLP papers on essay scoring and patent summarization sit next to product questions about recommendations, explanations, and human help. She is not treating every product observation as a formal academic study. She is treating both as ways of asking what happens when a person depends on a system.

Mayesha completed her bachelor’s degree in March 2026. She is preparing MASc applications for Fall 2027 and keeping a later PhD path in view.

The next chapter is study, research, and the same question she keeps returning to: what helps people find their way through complicated systems.