Mohammad Ali Mustafa

Academic

Career

Verbatim text

Mohammad Ali Mustafa (18I-0619) 
 
Life is a journey that consists of several milestones, selecting a university, and a field of study is one 
of the most significant of these milestones. For me, it took me the entirety of A levels to be 
completely satisfied with what field I wanted to pick. This also made the choice of opting for CS 
from FAST, being Pakistan’s most well-known institute for the degree, obvious. 
FAST was a completely unique experience for me. It had students from diverse backgrounds making 
an environment I was not accustomed to. This made it exciting and isolating at the same time. Like 
many students here, my first year was very challenging. FAST has a demanding education system 
for sure. But personally, I feel like it was the university’s method of training its students for real 
world scenarios. Many of the deadlines often coincided with each other as well. This made it 
necessary for you to allocate proper time for each of your tasks. It helped us understand the 
importance of thinking. Thinking about what we value for ourselves, thinking about how we want 
to plan on doing your assignments, thinking about the balance between education and our co- 
curricular activities.  
Being unsatisfied with my second semester, I vowed to improve my performance and spend more 
time thinking about and planning my actions. I had a simple goal of improving my SGPA every semester, making sure that I never get less than what I got in the previous one. Alhamdulillah, I succeeded in doing that, eventually earning a silver medal in my second last semester as well.  
For me, the faculty separated FAST from other institutes. As the CR of my class, I had to interact 
with the teachers more than others, humanizing them for me. From the HoD of our department 
personally handling our batch’s shuffling during the epidemic, to the director overlooking 
everything in the campus and interacting with the student body, to having teachers from the 3rd 
semesters still asking about their student’s well-being. Acts like these made me appreciate the 
faculty a lot. 
Looking back at my journey, with only a few months left here, I feel like I could have done some 
things better, but I am still content with my experience. The growth I managed to achieve in this 
institute was something I could not achieve in any other Pakistani institute and for that I am 
grateful to FAST. I am certainly proud of what some of my fellow batchmates have already 
managed to achieve and I believe most of them will excel in all the milestones they have yet to 
reach in their lives.