“English Linguistics? I don’t even consider it a degree. People will use that paper to put their samosa on it.” The man I had chosen as my future husband said this to me. Not a stranger. Not someone who randomly wandered into my life. The man I was going to build a home with, the man I was going to wake up next to every morning, looked me in the face and said this with a smirk, said it like it was the funniest thing he had ever come up with, and then had the nerve to apologise and say the exact same thing again two days later. Because that apology was just a break between insults.
They called my degree paper a ’samosa paper’
His sisters joined in too, the same women who had never once sat inside an office, never earned their own money, never built a single thing with their own hands, and one of them did not even finish her own degree before getting married. But my career? Oh, they had plenty to say about that. Loud opinions, delivered with full confidence, from women who had never once tried to build a career themselves. Someone please draft a decision tree showing how never working qualifies you to judge a career.
They said my degree was worthless. That same paper made me the Silver Medalist and the topper of my university. They said I would never make it. I got published across five continents. on some of the most prestigious platforms in the world, and my work is read by readers, academics, diplomats, policymakers, presidents, and global leaders across continents.
They called me too modern, too ambitious, too much. I became a Senior Project Manager, an international journalist, a multinational media contributor, a global public intellectual, a columnist, a senior eBook writer and editor, a former educator at Beaconhouse School System which is one of the most reputable school networks in Pakistan, and a former Council Member of the Young Peace and Development Corps at the National Dialogue Forum, IBA Karachi in 2019. They said I was not enough. My name is searched on Google. Theirs is not.
My name, my work, all over the internet
Now, here is what that samosa paper was doing while they were busy laughing. My name was being published across five continents, from Asia to Africa and from North America to Europe to Australia, in the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, The Star Media Group and The Sun in Malaysia, Crikey in Australia, the Bangkok Post in Thailand, the Dallas Morning News and the New York Daily News in the United States.
My work has featured in Morning Star and North West Bylines in the United Kingdom, Sowetan in South Africa, and right here, at home, in The News International, Dawn, and The Express Tribune in Pakistan. If that was not enough, I have been published across more than 50 other international publications, digital media platforms, news outlets, magazines, and editorial platforms spread across the globe. That samosa paper got me trained under Harvard Project Zero.
Google indexed my name, but did not see my struggle
And then Google did something that no engineering degree in his house could ever manage. Google indexed my name. Open Google right now, and type “Yumna Zahid Ali writer,” or “Yumna Zahid Ali journalist,” and see exactly what comes back. My name, my work, my bylines, my published identity, sitting permanently on the biggest search engine on the planet for the entire world to find. Now go ahead and type his name. Or his sister’s name. I will wait right here, and I am not in a hurry.
But here is what Google sees– and what it does not see. Google sees my name, my bylines, my authority, my publications, my credentials, my top grades, and my professional identity, built across years of real hard work. What Google does not see is the nights I cried alone, staring at the ceiling, wondering if they were right about me.
I absorbed the constant insults and the bullying in silence, because I genuinely did not know where to put the pain. The anxiety that sat on my chest every single day, like a weight that never lifted. The pulse rate, which dropped so dangerously low, (to 39), that I ended up in the emergency room, hooked to machines, surrounded by doctors. I was fighting to stabilise a body that had been broken down by someone else’s words and someone else’s ego.
The ICU visits, the wires, the monitors, the beeping machines, the oxygen mask strapped to my face because my body had simply stopped coping with the level of stress it was being forced to carry. The sleep apnea machine I wore every single night (UFFFF!) because the stress and depression had dropped my oxygen levels so critically low that sleeping without it was not safe.
The chemical imbalance in my brain that their repeated cruelty caused. The panic attacks I fought through in silence while still showing up, still working, still building, still proving, because stopping was never an option, even when my body was screaming at me to rest. The about-to-be-in-laws family that collectively tried to bury me under their judgments while I was quietly bleeding on the inside.
Google indexes my name, but it doesn’t know the price I paid to get here. It does not know the hospital rooms, the machines, the sleepless nights, the broken health, and the shattered confidence I had to rebuild from absolute scratch. It was not easy. It was one of the hardest things I have ever survived. But it was worth every single painful second of it.
Samosa paper girl to the rescue of the main doubter
And, do you know what is truly ironic? The man who told me to leave my job because my degree was going nowhere, went unemployed himself for 1.5 years. One and a half years of no salary, no job offer, and mounting stress. And who rescued him? I’m not saying, “I am so heavenly great,” … but it was me. The samosa paper girl. I rebuilt his CV from scratch, applied for jobs on his behalf, and he got hired in under a month using the exact skills and professional thinking that came from the degree he turned into a joke. Just for reference I did it because his CV had three different fonts and none of them were professional. My “useless degree,” was out here saving his “superior engineering degree,” from complete financial disaster. And even today, I earn more than he does.
Please do not get me wrong, my dear readers. I do not say this with any arrogance, or any ego, but with deep gratitude to Almighty God, who helped me see clearly, set me on the right path, and pulled me out of that toxic cycle of gaslighting. If God had not taken me out of that situation, I would honestly still be stuck in that manipulative relationship, believing that his insecurity was my failure. Honestly, I could not have scripted a better ending if I tried.
How useless is my English Linguistics degree?
Now, let us finally talk about how useless this degree actually is, because this lie deserves to be completely torn apart. Every engineer, every doctor, every professional who needs an IELTS score for a scholarship, a visa, a university admission, a work permit, a professional license, a job abroad, or immigration to an English-speaking country is being judged entirely on the standards and frameworks that English Linguistics built.
Who do people think created those systems? Who designed those tests, those rubrics, those language benchmarks that the entire world now depends on to measure human communication? English Linguistics did. The entire AI revolution, and everything within it, runs on natural language processing, which cannot exist without deep linguistic expertise. The chatbots people use daily, the voice assistants sitting in their homes, the translation tools that break language barriers across nations, the sentiment analysis tools that corporations use to understand their customers, all of it is built on the foundation of this field.
Forensic linguists walk into courtrooms and solve criminal cases using language as hard evidence, identifying authorship, detecting deception, and analyzing threatening communications that help put dangerous people behind bars. Computational linguists sit behind every Google search algorithm, every SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) system, every keyword strategy, and every content structure that keeps businesses alive, visible, and profitable in the digital economy.
Courts, and even Wikipedia, would fail without linguistics skills
Legal language holds entire court systems, constitutions, and international treaties together. Remove a linguist from the legal drafting process, and watch entire laws collapse into dangerous ambiguity. Medical writing keeps hospitals and healthcare systems communicating safely and accurately, because one wrong word in a medical document can cost a human life. Political speechwriting shapes entire governments, moves public opinion, and changes the course of history.
Content strategy and UX (user experience) writing decide whether a product outperforms competitors or fails in real-world adoption. Academic publishing advances human knowledge across every single discipline, including engineering and medicine. International diplomacy runs entirely on precise and culturally sensitive language expertise.
Wikipedia, the largest free knowledge base on the planet, is built and maintained through writing and editorial expertise. Subtitling, dubbing, and localisation of films, television, and digital content across languages is a multi-billion dollar industry that exists entirely because of linguistic knowledge. Publishing houses, advertising agencies, public relations firms, brand consultancies, and media organizations all hire people who understand language at its deepest level. Speech therapy and language pathology help children and adults recover their communication abilities, changing lives in ways that no engineering blueprint ever could. Scriptwriting, storytelling, and narrative design in the gaming industry, which is now bigger than Hollywood, all depend on people who understand how language creates emotion, tension, and meaning.
Let us not forget that, in the age of social media, the people who truly understand language, tone, audience, and communication are the ones actually running the digital world. Influencer strategy, community management, crisis communication, brand voice development, and digital journalism are all fields that this degree directly feeds into.
So, which exact part of this degree is useless? Point to it. Name it specifically. Go ahead and try. Because in all these years, not one person who laughed at it has ever been able to answer that question, and the reason they cannot answer it is because the answer is not a fixed feature of the degree, but of the person using it.
The objection was more about a woman getting a degree than the degree itself
Reality is harsh, yet uncomplicated. It was never about my degree. It was about the fact that he could see a woman growing, and it scared him. It was about the emotional truth that a woman’s ambition was bigger than his comfort. Genuinely confident people do not come back to the same topic repeatedly just to make someone else feel worthless. That obsessive need to tear someone down again and again is neither intelligence nor strength. That is just fear wearing a very loud mouth.
This is a disease sitting right at the heart of our society that we refuse to honestly call out. We have collectively decided that only doctors and engineers deserve to be taken seriously. Meanwhile, Linguistics, Psychology, IT, AI, Sociology, Political Science, International Relations, Philosophy, Communications, Law, Design, Architecture, Geography, Fine Arts, Social Work, Education, and others get treated like second-class choices, made by people who could not do better. But who is actually building the digital world, writing the laws, training the AI models, and shaping how billions of people think and communicate every single day? The degrees were never the problem. The people dismissing them simply stopped evolving, and became too proud to admit it.
Not to mention, the man who said my degree was only good for wrapping samosas in needed me, the linguistics graduate, to get him employed again. Let that land properly.
I believed them – and then I finally realised they were wrong
Now, to every single person reading this who has ever been mocked, bullied, gaslit, or made to feel small because of what they chose to study or who they chose to become, I need you to hear this from someone who lived it fully. Because of their insults, their bullying, their body shaming and their relentless gaslighting, I went into severe stress. My brain chemistry got disturbed. I had panic attacks. I had sleepless nights staring at the ceiling, wondering if they were right about me. I genuinely believed every single ugly thing they said, because when the person you are about to marry tells you that you are worthless, you start to think it must be true.
I believed it until I had had enough. Until something deep inside me got tired of shrinking. Until I decided to pick up every broken piece of myself and build something so undeniable that no smirk, no samosa joke, and no family gathering opinion could ever touch it again. And I did exactly that.
Don’t let other people define who you are
So, my dear readers, never let anyone decide who you are. Not your almost-husband. Not his sisters. Not his family. Not your family. Not society. Not anyone who has never had the courage to walk the path they are so confidently telling you leads nowhere. The only reason I am sharing all of this so openly and without any filters is because I do not want a single person reading this to go through what I went through.
We are living in a time where cases of severe stress, anxiety, depression, and heartbreakingly, suicide among daughters-in-law because of in-law torture and mental abuse are increasing at an alarming rate. These are not just statistics. These are real women, with real dreams, real degrees, and real futures, who were slowly convinced by the people around them that they were not enough, until they believed it completely. I refuse to stay silent about that. I do not want anyone lying awake at three in the morning, having panic attacks and questioning their entire existence just because of someone else’s insecurity and ignorance.
I do not want anyone’s brain chemistry getting disturbed; mine, or anyone else’s. I do not want to see their mental health falling apart, or them slowly shrinking themselves down to fit inside someone’s very small and very limited idea of success. And I absolutely do not want anyone being pushed into a coffin, literally or figuratively, because of someone else’s judgment and interpretation of who they are and what they are worth. It is not their job to define you. It never was. You are a fully capable, complete, and powerful individual who does not require anyone’s validation to exist, to succeed, or to take up space in this world. No degree, no passion, and no dream deserves to be destroyed by the opinions of people who were never qualified to judge it in the first place.
Believe in yourself, always.
So…do not quit the thing that sets your mind on fire. Do not give up on what you love, just because someone who never tried it decided it was pointless. If anyone has ever called you or your degree worthless, prove them wrong, not for them, but for yourself, because it was never about them anyway. It was always about you and what you are truly capable of when you finally stop listening to people who were never qualified to judge you from day one. Your name belongs somewhere permanent in this world, and the only person who gets to decide where that is….is YOU. Believe that you are a global star, and indeed you will become one.
“The same paper they laughed at now holds the weight of five continents.”
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