By Bryan Zandberg
Asha Padmanabhan enrolled in the Bachelor of Education program at UBC after graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in math. Today, she teaches math and calculus at a Richmond high school. “I got my dream job pretty fast,” she says.
As far as Arts students go, Asha Padmanabhan may appear to be a bit of an anomaly. For starters, she majored in Math, a subject many think belongs in the Faculty of Science. That and the fact that she’s one of those Arts Co-op students who do a complete 180 after they graduate by jumping into a job that’s totally unrelated to the ones she did as an undergrad.
On both counts, Padmanabhan’s anomalies have turned out to be big assets in the real world.
Take her experiences in co-op, for example. Padmanabhan says she was especially excited when she heard about a work placement with the BC Lung Association that came up in her third year. The posting was for the exact same occupation her mom does for a living — a special events coordinator. Because her mom always loved her job setting up events, Padmanabhan expected she would love it every bit as much. But it didn’t turn out that way. “I wasn’t as satisfied as I thought I would be,” Padmanabhan says of the experience. “Everyone that I worked with was great, but my heart just wasn’t in it.”
Knowing what you don’t want to do in life can be as important as knowing what you do. Once Padmanabhan realized she didn’t want to follow in her mother’s footsteps, she says it was easier to go after what she had secretly wanted — a career as a school teacher. After graduation, Padmanabhan decided to enroll in the Bachelor of Education program at UBC. With a teacher’s certificate and a B.A. in Math in hand, she was scooped up in no time. “It’s been absolutely great,” says Padmanabhan, now 29 years old, of her new career teaching math and calculus classes at a Richmond high school. “I got my dream job pretty fast.” She says the recruiters were hungry for someone with her qualifications.
In addition to her math major, Padmanabhan completed a second major in economics. Her degree was rounded out by the BA requirements, which included literature courses and a language other than English.
Now when she teaches her students, Padmanabhan integrates art and music into her lessons as a way to get her students to see how math connects with the real world. “It’s always much more fun to do it with art than with science,” she says of the teaching strategy. Geometry in drawing and painting and rhythm in music are the perfect means to get students thinking about math.
So was co-op a waste of time? Not in the least, she says. “If anyone asks me, I would basically recommend all Arts students do co-op, just to figure out what they want to do in life,” Padmanabhan says, adding that her work placements were the perfect social counterpoint to the lonely work of hitting the books.
And because she moved to B.C. from Dubai at the age of 18, she also found it a great way of meeting interesting and motivated people.
“I think everything you do shapes who you are,” she says.
