Growing up in Dhaka, Bangladesh, one of the world's poorest and most densely populated countries in the 1990s, Urbashee Paul had a childhood marked by obstacles and transience.
At just 5 years old, Paul, who is now a PhD in economics at Northeastern, saw moments that came to define the early part of her life.
Urbashee Paul. Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University
Women, holding babies in their arms, would jump up to the front door of her family's home, arms outstretched, begging for food.
Little children jumped from car to car, person to person, flocking goods to the streets to help their families get by.
In the village of Nalitabari, where her father came from, Pavlos often saw farmers with calluses on their hands and feet from doing hard work in the fields without protective shoes and gloves.
The Pauls themselves spent many nights huddled around a hurricane lamp in the dark, waiting for their power to be restored.
Food and electricity were not the only things in short supply in mid-1990s Dhaka. Opportunity was equally rare, especially for girls and women. So when her mother's job with a non-governmental organization focused on boosting women's entrepreneurship in Bangladesh allowed them to move to Sydney, Australia, the Pauls, intent on giving their daughter a better life, wasted no time grabbing the chance.
“I really owe a lot [my mother’s] sacrifice and initiative to move our family to Australia, where she later gave up her career to support our family and my father's efforts,” says Paul.
Looking back, Paul considers this the first pivotal moment in her life. In Sydney, she had the opportunity to learn English, make friends, experience a brand new culture and taste a semblance of freedom.
“I saw an even greater contrast between what girls in Bangladesh were doing at my age and what I could do,” says Paul. “My mom would let me take public buses to my school which was a few suburbs away by myself, and that's something I could never imagine doing in Bangladesh.”
And then, eight years later, the Pauls were back on top. The family, which now included her younger brother, Nisarga, sold their house, said goodbye to friends, and migrated to upstate New York so that her father, tired of working in industry, could return to school to get the his PhD in economics. The next five years would see the family living in the basement of an apartment building and surviving on a monthly allowance of $800.
“I think that's where the hardest chapter of my life began,” says Paul.
The winters were often brutal, he recalls.
“My parents told us not to turn on the heat because the electricity swelled, so we just packed clothes,” she says. “We didn't have a car, so we'd walk miles as a family to get our groceries and walk back through the snow.”
Around this time, Paul, who was now in high school, would begin to compare her life to others. Her family's finances often prevented her from participating in extracurricular activities with her classmates, and on weekends, when friends invited her to go shopping or out to eat, she had to decline.
“My family had everything on the line at that time in our lives,” she says, adding that their survival depended on her dad's success in school. they had no safety net.
Within a few years, once her father got his doctorate, the family's circumstances improved again. Pavlos remembers that at every step, her parents instilled in her the value of education.
But since her parents could not afford to pay for her education, Paul's only solution was to do well in school and pray for a scholarship.
“I miraculously won a full scholarship to Boston University,” he says. “And that's when my life started to change for the better.”
For the first time, Paul was living on her own in a big city and earning her own income. Motivated by the struggles of her upbringing, she found herself interested in the field of economics.
“I've always been curious about the world around me and why some people can't escape the cycle of poverty while others seem to get richer and richer,” she says.
Before coming to Northeastern, he worked at a public policy think tank in Washington, D.C., where he learned about the applications of economics to society and earned a master's degree in economics at George Washington University.
Now under the direction of Northeastern's associate professor Alicia Modestino, Paul analyzes the impact of private and public summer job programs on the academic outcomes and future employment outcomes of high school students. He also wants to better understand the barriers to opportunity that young people face in the US and other countries. Paul hopes her work will provide solutions to alleviate the economic inequality they may face later in life.
“I feel this is important because many of the critical steps that got me to where I am today happened during my teenage years and helped me get out of the financial obstacles that life threw at me,” he says. “If I hadn't overcome those hurdles at the crucial age between high school and college, I could be in a very different place now.”
Paul also studies how changes in the environment affect farmers living in the coastal areas of Bangladesh, a pressing issue in a country that is are at risk of being covered from water as sea levels rise due to global warming.
“Part of my research will look at the impact of groundwater salinity on poverty in Bangladesh,” he says. “If I can show that there is a significant negative impact of increasing groundwater salinity due to sea level rise in coastal Bangladesh, then I hope policy makers will take this into account and try to find feasible solutions for affected farmers , such as where they can relocate and what crops they can produce to adapt to this inevitable climate change.”
Paul recently received a grant from the William T. Grant Foundationwhich will allow her to attend academic conferences, purchase datasets for her thesis and participate in research training programs.
This month, Paul is helping to organize a conference that will showcase diversity in finance. With Title “DIVERSEEcon“, the conference will take place on October 30 at 4:30 p.m. in Room 340 of the Curry Student Center on the Boston campus.
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