From a missed medical seat to Bangladesh’s first public university teacher from Garo community

Jessy Daisy Marak had planned on becoming a doctor.

She had studied science, won a Talent Pool scholarship in eighth grade and gone from Birishiri Mission Girls’ High School in Netrokona to Holy Cross College in Dhaka. Medical college was supposed to come next.

It did not.

Daisy made the waiting list in the medical admission test but never received the call she had hoped for. By the 2005-06 academic year, she had to make another choice of studying linguistics at the University of Dhaka.

It felt, at first, less like a choice than a concession.

Years later, that unwanted turn would take her somewhere she had never planned to go. Daisy graduated first in her class in both her honours and master’s programmes, joined the University of Chittagong and became, according to her account, the first public university teacher from Bangladesh’s Garo community.

She is now an assistant professor of linguistics, with ambitions to research language, culture and identity. The medical seat that never came had quietly redirected her life.

An accidental linguist

Daisy grew up in Bhutia village in Madhupur upazila of Tangail, in a family where education — and particularly teaching — was deeply embedded.

But her own ambition lay elsewhere. She imagined a career in medicine, and the disappointment of failing to secure admission followed her when she arrived at Dhaka University.

“Honestly, Linguistics was not a subject I had dreamed of studying,” Daisy told Daily Waadaa, “But I started to like it during my first year of studying.” 

One early assignment proved veryimportant. Professor Salma Nasrin had asked the class to complete a piece of coursework. Daisy's submission stood out.

“Salma madam showed it to the other students and said an “A-plus” did not seem sufficient,” Daisy said, “She jokingly awarded it an ‘A-double-plus.’”

It was a small classroom moment, but for Daisy, who was still adjusting to a subject she had not intended to study, it mattered. Another came in a phonetics and phonology class taught by Professor Zeenat Imtiaz Ali.

Students approached the class seriously. Those unable to answer questions could be left standing, and preparation was expected.

One day, Zeenat turned to Daisy. “I hope you can do it,” Daisy remembers her saying. “You won’t have to stand.”

What Daisy remembers most was not the prospect of avoiding embarrassment. It was that her teacher expected her to know the answer. The confidence was contagious.

After class, the library

Daisy developed a routine. When classes ended, she headed for the University of Dhaka Central Library

“If something did not make sense, I read it again. When books were not enough, I went back to my teachers with questions,” she said

Over time, the subject that had begun as a substitute for medicine became an intellectual interest of its own.

Her results reflected the shift. Daisy finished first in her class with first-class results in both honours and master's. She also ventured beyond her degree, studying Spanish and German at Dhaka University's Institute of Modern Languages.

By graduation, the student who had arrived disappointed about medical school had become deeply immersed in language. The next question was what to do with it.

After completing her master's, Daisy applied for the 33rd Bangladesh Civil Service examination. She passed the preliminary examination, the written test and the viva and waited for the final result.

While she was waiting, she noticed another opening. The University of Chittagong was recruiting a lecturer for its Department of Linguistics. She applied.

After going through the selection process and interview, there was another period of waiting — something Daisy had experienced before, though this time the outcome would be different.

A letter eventually arrived from Chittagong and she opened the envelope. The first word was “Congratulations.” Daisy had been provisionally selected as a lecturer. This time, she had made the list.

A first she did not know she was

Only after securing the job did Daisy begin to understand that the appointment carried significance beyond her own career.

By joining the University of Chittagong, she became the first university teacher from Bangladesh's Garo community, she said. She had not known that when she applied.

It was only after people began congratulating her that she realised she had crossed a boundary that no one from her community had crossed before.

The achievement was particularly significant for a Garo woman from Madhupur.

Bangladesh's ethnic minority communities remain underrepresented in many of the country's institutions, while students from remote and marginalised communities can face additional obstacles in reaching higher education.

Daisy's appointment did not remove those barriers. But it placed someone from her community on the other side of one of them, at the front of a public university classroom.

There was also an irony closer to home. Daisy had spent much of her childhood surrounded by teachers.

Her mother, Minu Hajong, was one. So was her maternal grandfather. Her maternal uncles and aunts taught. Her father began his career as a teacher. Her sister became one too.

Teaching had become something of a family trade. “I couldn't escape the family profession,” Daisy joked.

—