Determination - Earth To Sky --10 to main account

This is a picture of Ansar Ali from eight years ago. At the time, he was a waiter at the LUMS branch of Zakir Tikka, having had to quit school after the 9th grade. In two months, he will graduate from SZABIST with a BS in Accounting and Finance. (Thread; 1/25).

Back in 2013, the LUMS Photographic Society was doing a series of profiles on people on campus titled 'Humans of LUMS'. This photo was a part of that campaign, along with the following interview in the caption:

The solemn expression in this picture is pretty misleading: nimble Ansar was always smiling as he sprang from one order to the next. Quite effortlessly, he was everyone's favorite. No one had seriously suspected the sorrow behind that smile.
To have been so fond of school, but compelled by circumstance to turn away is one thing. But to abandon school to work in a university - amidst all these students, frothing with ideas and things that they had just learned - much as he once did, seemed a special kind of cruelty.
But, we were just a bunch of kids - significantly more privileged than most (even as we grumbled about not having been able to afford to study abroad), but still students on student budgets. And so we assuaged our guilt by tipping him as generously as we could whenever we could.
Fast-forward two years. I was President of the student body & as our tenure drew to an end, we were mulling over a Parting Gift (a loose tradition where the graduating batch would sometimes give back to the campus community). We decided we were going to put Ansar back in school.I sat down with him one night at Zakir, over some Chicken Madrasi, and told him what we were thinking. His excitement was tinged with the trepidation that comes with something that seems (understandably) too good to be true. So I asked him what it would take.Quite soon after the initial excitement settled, it became obvious that this would be a lot more complicated than we had thought. Covering his fees wouldn't be enough. To make this work, we would have to provide for his family too; that was why he had to quit, to begin with.

I went to visit his family in Nankana Sahib. His mother was clearly proud of what a good student he had been. Hanging on his wall was a plaque he had received over a decade ago when he came 1st in the fifth grade.But no amount of pontification on long-term vs. short-term decision-making would put food on their table. We left seeking one thing:if we ensured that the family continued to get what he was making at the moment would they promise not to take him out of school? His mother agreed.
Covering both things would cost around 30k a month. He still had to do his FA/FSc, and then university. Assuming nothing increased, this would be a total amount of close to 20 lakhs. It seemed a fairly impossible task, but we decided we would figure it out as we went along.

We set up a GoFundMe account and put up donation boxes all over campus. This picture was taken by the Photographic Society in the same spot where that first shot was taken. A week after, Ansar quit his job at Zakir.

Ansar was going back to school.

Every step of the way brought new challenges. Because he had been away from school for over 4 years, at 22, Ansar could only take his Intermediate Exams privately. This meant that he couldn't take subjects that had a practical component. Consequently, he could only do his FA.To save on rent, Ansar moved into a room in our home. There, he would study into the early hours of the morning. (After a gap of close to a decade, he had a lot to catch up on.) On his wall, he had a note to himself: "I will score 800+".The initial money we had raised was only enough to cover a year and a half out of five years. But every time it was about to run out, something or the other would work out. Students who became grownups with jobs began to help. Complete strangers would contribute.
Of course, there was no shortage of criticism either: Why put so much into one person? There are so many others out there. He will become spoiled and lazy. etc. etc.
None of that made much sense. Our lives were literally accidents of birth; if no one audited our fate, why should we examine his?

We kept collecting what we could, and he kept studying.

Two years later, Ansar passed his FA with over 800 marks, and an overall grade of an 'A'.
Now it was time for university. Ansar was good with numbers and decided he wanted to study accounting. We applied to several places, and he got into SZABIST with a partial scholarship. Here, new challenges.Ansar might have been good with numbers, but the language barrier would be hard to overcome (for context, three of my friends who went to private schools in Isb also went to SZABIST). In his first semester, he got an A in Financial Accounting and a D in communication skills.
One thing was clear: if you can't speak English, then even in Pakistan, a big old ceiling looms right above your head. So we found an online English course and enrolled Ansar in that. The results weren't instant, but he has now cleared level C2 (good enough for IELTS 9.0).

And this is Ansar, now - in a very much non-photoshopped suit, presenting on Monetary Policy, as he finishes his BS in Accounting and Finance at SZABIST, in Islamabad.
Needless to say, Ansar has come a long long way. And none of this would have been possible without the generosity and support of countless people along the way. But there's one more step - and that's where you can become a part of his journey.
Ansar is to graduate in June so we're now on the hunt for a job. He would like to work in Accounts and has completed an internship at a firm that's offered him a job. But, given everything that's gone into this journey, I just want to make sure he takes the best offer he can get.