Arsalan Karim: ” Think about what you want to do in life, what you enjoy and move towards that”

We love catching up with our graduates to hear about their experiences and successes! We recently had the pleasure of connecting with Arsalan Karim, who graduated from our Immigration Consultant Diploma Program. Read on to hear about his insights, memorable learning experiences and career transition.

Could you tell us a little bit about your career and educational background and how you ended up at Ashton college? 

I am a physician by background. I did clinical for a few years and then moved more into healthcare management strategy and business analysis, everything related within the healthcare domain. When I came to Canada, that was back in 2013, I ended up at the University of Toronto. I did my Master's in Health Information. And after graduating, I was involved in healthcare architecture projects, basically designing healthcare all the way from the start all the way up, scale it down to a clinic or scale it up to a province or a whole country. So, it's a kind of projects that involved healthcare-related architecture and design, it could be a system or technology or designing processes. I was mainly working in that area for a few years. Actually, I'm still doing healthcare consulting now. At the time, I wanted to, you know, divert from that career. 

I originally came from Dubai. Dubai has a very big market when it comes to people immigrating. Everybody wants to migrate. I was there in 2019, working on a project for over one year. During that time, so many people came up to me and said, “Hey, we need to move out, we need to go to Canada.” I was thinking, you know, maybe it's a good market. It’s a good consulting business. So why not? I get into it, see what I can do for people. I looked around to see what the process was like, and how I could help people in that area. I googled and ended up on Ashton's website. I just registered and things went on from there. I was also doing my project in Dubai for the first five months of the course.  

After I wrapped up my project in Dubai, I came back and then I finished the next four months here in Canada. Since then, a lot of people have actually approached me and to ask me about it. Like how to start the process of immigrating to Canada. Now I'm actually coming to a stage where I might be taking this on as my main consulting role. My healthcare consulting would probably go one step back.   

Immigration law sounds like such a natural transition for you. Can you tell us more about that? 

I have a lot of friends based across Asia. Some in India, Pakistan and China. They're actually in the business of recruiting manpower and labour. They want to have discussions with me on how we can work together and help people moving here and there.

Do you have any favourite instructors or any memorable learning experiences from Ashton College? 

They were very good instructors. I specifically enjoyed classes taught by Ali Yemeni. One of the things that I liked about him was that if you ask him a question, he would go down to your level and see how good you are. And then he'll take you from there. I enjoyed Dom's classes as well. He's a lawyer, so he knows what he's teaching. He has experience in business immigration. He gave us some really nice inputs into how finances need to be arranged and how to manage your client accounts. That's very helpful and practical. 

Would you say that the program helped you improve your confidence in the workforce? 

Yes, of course. I'm 100% more confident. 

 What advice would you offer to someone who is considering continuing education or entering a new career program? 

I've got two daughters. And one of the struggles that I have with one of them is to help them figure out what they want to do with their life. It's very important to know what they don't like.  So back then, when I was young, my parents could tell me, you need to be a doctor, or you need to be an engineer or something like that. But now it is different, I think people should follow what they like. If you are unsure, look at what you're good at. When you start going into a field, if you like it, and you're good at it, you're going to be successful in it. Also, try to play off your strengths. For example, my daughter is good at designing. So, I thought, why don't you look at marketing and design and all those kinds of things. She tried and found it interesting. Now she's actually looking at courses and different kinds of programs around that. So, think about what you want to do in life, what are the things that you enjoy doing? Work your way towards that.