She Showed Him The Mall. HE Said Welcome To America.
Bahar Javan - Program Manager, MEP Engineering
Bahar Javan opened a biology textbook on the first day of her second year of high school, looked at the diagrams of veins and tissue, and closed it.
Just like that. “I am not the person that wants to study that,” she decided.“Give me the math.”
It sounds simple. In Iran, in the late 1990s, it was anything but.
Bahar grew up in Tehran in the generation born after the Iran-Iraq war, which meant her age group was enormous and the competition for university
spots was brutal. The path to higher education ran through a single four hour entrance exam that covered everything from high school, assigned
you a national ranking, and determined not just
whether you got in, but what you were permitted to study and where. Girls faced an additional constraint, families did not allow daughters to sleep away from home, which meant you could only attend a university close enough to commute back to each night.
Bahar’s accepted university was three hours away. Her parents drove her there and back every single day she had class. Every day. For years. “If they didn’t do it, I couldn’t go there. I’m really thankful for them.”
The university itself was still developing – the infrastructure thin, the surrounding area so undeveloped that she remembers walking through the entrance doors on her first day of enrollment and stopping cold. On the
other side of the building, sheep were grazing. Literally. She looked around at where she had come to earn an electrical engineering degree and thought: the university of the sheep. She earned her degree there anyway.
In that time and place, if a woman did not get into university, the expectation was marriage. Those were the options. Within university ,engineer or doctor – nothing else was considered acceptable. Her mother pushed for medicine. Bahar lasted one year in the science track before she made her decision at that textbook and never revisited it. Switching tracks required taking supplemental courses through an adult school, sitting in classes alongside people who had started their education very late in life. It was uncomfortable. She did it anyway.
She was accepted into electrical engineering. In her entire program, there were six women. She was part of the first group of women to ever graduate from that major at her university, in a field where the boys had been studying engineering concepts since high school and the girls had not. “I had to feel good and
proud of myself that I did it,” she says.
Her father, who worked for the Iranian government
overseeing construction of state-built facilities, had
taken her to job sites since she was young. When
she graduated, he helped her land her first role: the
design and construction of a new prison. From there
she moved to hospitals, smart residential buildings,
hotels, and eventually the project that would carry
her to America, the Atlas Mall in Tehran.
Her reasons for leaving were specific. The
mandatory hijab laws had become something she
was no longer willing to accept.
She chose the student visa route and prepared for
the embassy interview. When she arrived, the
officer spoke English instead of Farsi. She hadn’t
expected that. She did her best. She showed him
the Atlas Mall. He searched it. He found it. He saw
her name. “Okay,” he said. “Welcome to the US. Go
and study for more.”
She came to America and went straight to work, no
additional exams required in electrical engineering. She eventually found her way to her current team, drawn largely by the practical reality that it was close to her home in Lake Mary.
What she found there was a workplace that felt like a community, that flexed when she needed it, and that asked very little beyond the quality of her work.
When asked what she would say to a woman considering engineering, she answers without hesitation. “You are stronger and braver than you think. You can pass everything.” She would know. She would know. She has the math to prove it, and a mall in Tehran that carries her work.
