During his school days in Bangladesh, Mohammod Irfan always believed that if given the opportunity to study in the United States it would be an invaluable experience for him. “I am from Bangladesh. I was born in a coastal city of Bangladesh Chittagong and I came to the U.S. in 1999 to study international studies and I heard during my school days in Bangladesh that the U.S. has a very good education system and I have seen my professors with a U.S. education doing very good in my classes at Dhaka University so I always thought whenever I get an opportunity I should get this very good education from a U.S. school,” he says. “I am at the graduate school of international studies at the University of Denver.”
Mohammod is working on a PhD Degree in international studies. He says people at the university are friendly and the environment is a bit different from what he is use to back home. “What I found from my very first days at the University of Denver and it continues until today is the people here are very friendly. Whenever I see my people at the school whether I know them or not they will give me a very smiling ‘hi’ which actually makes my day a lot of the days,” he says. “Inside of the classroom I have found the atmosphere and the environment to be very mutually respectful. I mean I come from a country where there are a lot of traditional values and we respect the seniors and I believe they have respect for us as well, but you don’t see the respect very much in traditional societies, which I have seen in the classroom here from my professor I mean the respect goes both ways, the professors are respecting the students and the students are respecting the professors," he says. "The evaluations are two way which I haven’t seen in my home country at Dhaka University and also there are a lot of discussions in the classroom. There back home in Bangladesh it was mostly lecturing by the professors and here in the classroom I see a lot of discussions with the professors and the students on different issues from a different angle and perspectives.”
While attending college, Mohammod has been able to receive hands on experience on a computer modeling project which is now helping him to complete his dissertation. “I do computer modeling of social and economic systems and before I came here actually I looked at the university website and I found a professor here Dr. Barry Hughes who is actually working on a global long range computer model," he says. "So I decided even before coming here that I would look for a chance to work with him and I was fortunate enough when I came here that I could talk to him and have an opportunity to work with him on his model for the last five years. I worked on building the interface of the model and finally for my PhD dissertation I started modeling myself," he adds. "Personally I model the education systems of various countries of the world actually all of the countries of the world and will look at formal education sectors of 182 countries where we see whether what kind of graduates they will have, what impacts those graduates will have on the economy and what will be the forwarded implications like achieving the millennium development goals by being able to achieve high education output by the countries.”
Mohammod says it not just the education one can gain by studying in the United States, but the exposure is just as important. “I think any good school in any good place in the world can give you the training necessary in a certain field like to become a physician you can learn it at a medical school in Bangladesh also, but the thing about coming to the U.S. is the exposure,” he says. “ You come to a school or you come to a place where you see people from different places of the world and you see works concerning different problems from around the globe that is something you don’t get maybe in some of the developing countries even in some of the developed countries other than the U.S. So the good thing about coming to the U.S. is that one should always look for the opportunities to interact with people and activities from different parts of the globe.”
