Alum of the Week: Zoha Qamar

By: Ella Brady, Ashley Jiang, Nicholas Rose

Zoha Qamar's surge to success developed from immigrant family roots that shaped her religious consciousness, female identity and a connection to her South Asian culture.

Part of what compelled Qamar to attend Exeter was to fight back against sexism in her hometown and ethnic community. “I wanted to go to boarding school in the first place [because of] stigma in my home Muslim Pakistani-American community against girls going away to school outside of California,” Qamar said. “There was backlash toward my family, especially my parents and me, as I set my sights on New England boarding schools.”

Qamar felt daunted by the Harkness table when she first set foot on campus. “I didn’t enjoy talking on the spot and articulating myself, especially to challenge other people,” Qamar said. “[Learning to] assert myself, without the fear of defending myself if someone challenged me, was a whole process.”

Throughout her four years, Qamar became interested in a variety of interests, from Feminist Union to lacrosse. Some even stemmed from her early hesitance in the humanities. “I was really not a good writer when I entered Exeter, and I was struggling in my humanities classes, so I honestly joined The Exonian as a way to just force practice my writing, and have some semblance of a deadline,” Qamar explained.

Growing up Muslim-American in the time after the tragedy of 9/11, Qamar developed a significant interest towards Middle Eastern studies. “She understood as a young Muslim-American woman what systemic oppression felt like, looked like and how it operated,” English instructor Mercy Carbonell said.

This understanding materialized in her curiosity about Exeter’s unique educational opportunities, which propelled her to explore and connect with her identity. “Having an Arabic program, even if only for seniors, was part of the reason I was even interested in Exeter to begin with,” she said.

After taking HIS586: Contemporary Middle East in her senior fall, Qamar went on to tackle a senior project with dorm-mate Saisha Talwar ’15 to further educate herself and the Exeter community on contemporary issues in the Middle East. “The girls conceived, planned and managed three evening programs over the course of the term, including a lecture by a noted expert in the Middle East, Reza Aslan. It was a really sophisticated project and I enjoyed every minute of it,” History Instructor and project adviser Michael Golay said. “The programs drew big crowds, too.”

Crediting the Academy for her confidence and newfound passions, Qamar left behind a lasting impression on many faculty and classmates. “She really changed the way I acted in school because she would always connect the material we were studying with important social/political/cultural issues,” Phillip Tsien ’15 stated.

“Zoha is just one of those people who has such deep personal integrity that she is deeply influential. She almost doesn’t have to mount a campaign or try. She can articulate things the rest of us are still fuzzy about,” former History Instructor and JV lacrosse coach Amy Schwartz added.

The summer after her graduation, Qamar criticized the Academy’s approach to sexual assault in an article for Jezebel titled “When I Tried to Talk to My Prep School About Rape Culture, They Wouldn’t Listen.”

“It was prescient, appearing as it did a year before some quiet public revelations about specific cases, and I’ve always thought it nudged the school closer to examining the issues and doing something about them,” Golay explained.

This singular article inspired students across campus to challenge social constructs and power structures. “I had a group of advisees who really looked up to Zoha; their campus activism and political values were strongly influenced and shaped by her example,” Schwartz recalled.

After graduating from Exeter in 2015, Qamar furthered her studies at Columbia University, where she majored in computer science and minored in English literature. However, she quit her writing position at the Columbia Spectator after a week, after realizing that breaking news was not her passion. However, Qamar gained valuable insight from some of her classes. “The English classes I took were mostly in either South Asian literature or gender studies. There was a really good mix of my interests and kind of my background in those classes, and I feel I really learned a lot there,” she explained.

Qamar believed she also learned about hitting her limits at Columbia, which she wished she had realized earlier at Exeter. “I think I definitely hit a breaking point. For a while in college, it was unsustainable, and I just was not really happy and not really focused,” Qamar shared.

The experience and depth of knowledge that Qamar possesses is vast. She worked at CNN and Vice News after graduating college, and is currently working at the New York Times as a Senior Analyst. “[At CNN] I was an intern on the breaking news desks and in Santa Ana, [and] I was working out of the Hong Kong bureau,” Qamar explained. “[At] vice I was in Brooklyn, so that was during the school year. My roles there were very focused on hard breaking news, not necessarily hard hitting news, but...quick facts...that need to be turned out in a couple of hours.”

Utilizing her background both in computer science and journalism as a data analyst at the New York Times, Qamar works to understand the demographics of their audience and widen viewership. “We are trying to better understand users and give meaning to data. Big data is obviously a huge term and very amorphous. Our job is ultimately to cultivate insights and allow every piece of data that we collect to have meaning, and contextualize who our audiences are, and what sort of content we can offer that will broaden their scope,” Qamar said.

For the industry in which Qamar works, the future is hardly set in stone. “Media and journalism is very fast changing. There are a lot of unanswered questions and unaddressed concerns in terms of how places will fare; you can already see the evaporation of local news and the monopoly that bigger places are starting to hold.”

Similarly, Qamar’s own future is up in the air, her ambition always leading her to consider interdisciplinary opportunities. “My dream job would just be to write, [but] even though it's my favorite thing to do, I think there would always be a piece missing if I didn't have some integration of technology or science.”

Even outside of strictly work-related affairs, Qamar loves to write, especially creative nonfiction based on her own childhood. “A big part of my writing always stemmed from a religious standpoint; there's a lot of gendered religious dynamics that I grew up with,” Qamar said.

Qamar further finds that writing allows her to unpack and reflect on such experiences. “I feel like writing is both a product and a means,” she related. “In some ways, it's something I can look at and say that this is something that I created, but I also think about how it allows me to think and see the world differently, after writing something I really value.”

Qamar advised introspection and self-care as a path towards empathy for others. “If there was one piece of life changing advice, I recommend humanizing yourself to yourself, most importantly to understand [that] everyone is going through some version of [a struggle],” she said. “Your struggles might be your struggles, but you're not the only one hurting or facing a challenge.”