Hello, Rishal here! 

On this beautiful afternoon in April '25, while I am nearing the completion of my master's in the United States - I am reflecting on my entire journey pursuing geography as an academic discipline - which also mirrors my life. I grew up in one of the most densely populated cities in the world, Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, and was exposed to many opportunities. My businessman father (who liked to introduce himself as a journalist) and housewife mother always supported the creative aspirations of all four brothers from our childhood. I was fond of books and creative writing in my high school days and ended up writing a few stories and poems. I was so passionate about writing that I worked for free as a contributing feature writer at the Daily Ittefaq, a prominent newspaper in our country. Later, I started playing guitar and formed a band; all I wanted was to be a musician. As life unfolded, I landed in a Geography and Environment major at one of the most beautiful public university campuses in Bangladesh, Jahangirnagar University (JU). It felt like a similar shift my friend Dhrubo experienced later in his life, from being a music graduate to putting his heart and soul into becoming a data scientist.

​

Despite all the ups and downs, I enjoyed my undergraduate days a lot. Being someone who loves culture and people at the JU campus, often called the cultural capital, provided me with opportunities to attend, organize, and perform at various cultural events. At the time when I was trying to form another band and putting my passion for writing and love for music into composing new songs, I had the opportunity to attend a summer school on 'Geoinformatics for Sustainable Agriculture' at the prominent institute in Thailand, the Asian Institute of Technology. Meeting people from nine different countries and listening to their geographic perspectives and challenges was a game-changer in my early academic journey. Slowly, my genuine interest in geography developed over time, as it was all about people and places. Bangladesh faces many devastating climate change and natural hazard-related issues every year, resulting in significant losses to both life and livelihood. I started going on different projects for field trips to many corners of Bangladesh to talk with people, interview them, and analyze their challenges in academic language. The use of GIS with remotely sensed satellite imagery started to make sense, looking at things on different spatiotemporal scales, mapping their location of risk and vulnerability. I was fortunate enough to meet my mentor, Dr. Sheikh Tawhidul Islam, while working for the Institute of Remote Sensing and GIS at JU campus. He developed my foundation in the concepts of geography as an academic discipline and how it can be implemented to solve many socio-eco-environmental issues related to climate change, biodiversity, sustainability, natural hazards, international development, etc. Most of my teachings were never in a classroom setting but through driving back home from campus, during field visits, or over a coffee at a cafe with Dr Islam. Debates on different metaphysical aspects of geography with my friends, Soumic and Sakib, helped me develop my philosophy and approach to geography as an academic discipline. This excellent team allowed us to work on multiple research projects and present a project on energy demand-based GHG emissions at the AIT campus in Thailand, again with an invitation from Dr. Joyashree Roy, another academic mentor of mine. I was so inspired by Dr. Roy, who was on the Nobel-winning committee of the IPCC and working globally on climate change mitigation. After meeting her during my 2018 visit to Thailand, I wanted to undertake a project under her guidance. From that inspiration, I initiated the project with Sakib and Soumic under the mentorship of Dr. Roy and Dr. Islam at JU campus to measure and mitigate the carbon footprint of the JU campus. Being an economist, she gave me the invaluable advice to pursue a master's in the same discipline and use a geographic lens to solve many issues, while I was considering various fields like climate change or sustainability.

​

The pursuit of Geography continues as I got multiple fully funded positions in US universities for doing my master's. I accepted the offer at Auburn University, where I met another mentor, Dr. Chandana Mitra, who is originally from West Bengal, India, but speaks the same language and shares a similar culture. Being a physical geographer and climatologist, she helped me to develop my ideas on urban climate. Heatwaves are a major concern in South Asian cities in recent times - so I started working on looking into the land use and land cover change of nine cities in five different countries, trying to answer the question of how urbanization is impacting the increasing heat in those cities. Despite all the remote sensing and GIS analysis, she inspired me to look into climate policies to talk about people. With this research, I got the opportunity to attend multiple conferences: American Geographical Society (AGS '24), American Geophysical Union. (AGU '24) and American Association of Geographers (AAG '25). The biggest gathering of geographers from around the world at AAG in Detroit sparked my inner geographer and surprised me with so many different issues, from cultural and colonial geography to GeoAI. It started making sense of what Mowry-Mora, my geoally(!) of three consecutive geo conferences, stated earlier: "You are no longer an aspirant geographer, Rishal; you are a GEOGRAPHER now!"

​

To be continued...​​​