Why I switched from science to business studies

When I tell someone in Bangladesh that I finished school in the science stream with a GPA of 5.00 and then chose business studies for college, there is always a short pause before they answer. In our system, science is the top of a ladder and everybody knows the order. You take science if you can, commerce if you cannot, and humanities if you cannot do that either. Moving down that ladder on purpose is heard as a failure being described as a choice.

So let me describe the choice properly, because it is the most deliberate one I have made.

What science was actually good for

I do not regret a single year of it. The science stream gave me the only formal training I have in being wrong on purpose: build a model, work out what it predicts, check, discard it when the numbers disagree. Four years of the Bangladesh Mathematical Olympiad did more for how I think than anything else in my education, and I still use that habit daily. When I am arguing about a pricing model with someone, what I am really doing is asking what this model predicts and whether we have anything that could contradict it.

It also taught me what a hard problem feels like from the inside, which turns out to be the most transferable thing on the list. Most people give up at the point where a problem stops being pleasant. Olympiad training moves that point a long way back.

The question I could not answer

By sixteen I had been taking paying client work for three years and had been running Let'sGo, my agency, for two. In that time I watched something happen repeatedly that I had no framework for.

A client would come to us with a genuinely better product than their competitor's. Better built, cheaper to run, solving the same problem with fewer steps. And it would lose. Not narrowly - comprehensively, to something worse. Meanwhile another client with a mediocre product and an obvious understanding of exactly who they were selling to would grow every quarter.

I could build either of those products. I could not predict which one would win, and I could not explain, after the fact, why one had. That is a bad position for someone who intends to spend his life starting companies. It meant every venture I began was a coin flip that I was calling skill.

Nothing in the science stream was going to answer that. It is not a physics question or a chemistry question. It is a question about markets, incentives, distribution and human decisions under uncertainty, and there is a whole discipline for it that I was not studying because studying it is considered a step down.

The ladder measures status, not learning

Here is the part I actually object to. The science-first hierarchy in Bangladesh is not a claim about which subject is more rigorous. It is a claim about which subject signals more intelligence to other people. Those are completely different things, and confusing them costs this country an enormous amount.

A stream is a toolkit. The question worth asking is which toolkit fits the problems you intend to spend your time on, and for me the answer stopped being ambiguous somewhere around the third client whose failure I could not explain. Staying in science would have been the higher-status decision. It would also have meant spending two more years getting better at answering questions I was not going to be asked.

I would rather be properly trained in the thing I actually intend to do than decorated in the thing I already knew I could pass.

What it cost

I should be honest about this, because most essays like this one are not.

It closed doors. Medicine and engineering are gone as options in the local system, and those are not small doors. It also cost me something less concrete: in a science-stream cohort I was a known quantity with a track record, and I gave that up to arrive somewhere new, at the bottom, where nobody had any particular reason to take me seriously.

And it is not a decision I can prove was correct. If I had stayed in science and built the same companies anyway, I would have no way of knowing what I had lost. That is true in both directions. What I can say is that the reasoning was sound at the time with the information I had, which is the only standard any decision can actually be held to.

What it has bought so far

Two years in, some of it has cashed out. I took the University of Virginia's Business and IT Strategy specialization and finished at 100%, which was the first time I had a vocabulary for the thing I had been watching happen to my clients. I won Gold at the International Business and Innovation Olympiad against students from forty-eight countries, and the CEO for a Day competition at Business Fest Bangladesh against a thousand-odd others.

The competitions matter less than this: I am building VivaBoard and Kemon as business problems that happen to require engineering, rather than engineering problems I am hoping will find a business. Kemon's core decision - that you must upload a receipt before you can leave a review - is not a technical decision at all. It is a decision about incentives, about what a review costs to produce and therefore what it is worth. Two years ago I would have built the review system and then wondered why nobody trusted it.

If you are deciding this now

Do not take my answer. Take the question.

Ask what you intend to spend the next ten years doing, and then ask which toolkit that work actually requires. If the honest answer is science, take science, and take it because it is the right tool and not because of where it sits on the ladder. If the honest answer is something else, the ladder is going to cost you those ten years and it will not pay you back for them.

The stream is not the achievement. What you build with it is.