Sabiha Mili always wanted to be a teacher. Not in the vague, childhood-dream sense, but as a genuine, considered ambition which she carried into her BBA years at IBA, Jahangirnagar University.

The problem was that nobody around her seemed to think that path made much sense for a business student. Research was for the science and economics departments. Marketing graduates went into marketing. The conventional way was always there.

At IBA-JU, the person who made that refusal possible was Associate Professor Saptarshi Dhar. While most of her peers were focused on grades and placement, Sabiha was being taught what research actually looks like from the inside, not as a checkbox at the end of a degree, but as a living, practical method for understanding real problems.

“Without her guidance and support, I would have struggled a lot to pursue this journey at all,” she says.

That early, hands-on exposure did not just prepare her for a PhD application years later. It quietly rewired how she thought about every professional role that followed, and it kept the teaching ambition alive, now grounded in something more rigorous than a dream.

And there were many roles that followed.

After graduating at the top of her MBA cohort from IBA-JU, a result she describes as a major source of motivation to push further, she did not go straight into academia. She went into the world. A year as a researcher at Innovision Consulting. More than two years at 10 Minute School, first as an instructor, then as a senior marketing executive. Then VisionSpring, the global social enterprise working on vision access for low-income populations, where she spent nearly three years as a global marketing consultant.

In between, a lectureship at East West University. Six and a half years as an associate member of the UN Youth and Students Association of Bangladesh.

To someone looking at a profile, these look like diverse, disconnected chapters. Sabiha sees them differently. “Titles are common,” she says. “What likely made them take notice was how all of my experiences were connected.”

Each role, however different on the surface, was circling back to the same set of questions about markets, human behaviour, and what happens when systems fail the people they are supposed to serve. Her research, now housed within the Graduate School of Economics at Osaka University under Business Administration with a major in Marketing, explores exactly those intersections, consumer behaviour, market dynamics, and the kinds of questions her years in industry kept raising but never fully answered. “It wasn’t the diversity of my experiences that mattered,” she reflects, “but the alignment between them.”

That alignment is also what made her research proposal possible.

How to make the application fundable

The MEXT scholarship is Japan’s government-funded programme for international graduate students, fully funded, covering tuition, living allowance, and travel. Most Bangladeshi students who have heard of it know the embassy route, where you apply through the Japanese Embassy in Dhaka.

Far fewer know about the university recommendation route, which is the path Sabiha took and which works almost entirely differently.

In the university recommendation route, the process does not begin with a form. It begins with a professor.

One finds a researcher in Japan whose work genuinely connects with yours. Reaching out, one builds a relationship.

If it goes well, they agree to supervise you. You then apply formally to the university, which screens your application internally. If you pass that screening, the university submits your nomination directly to MEXT.

By the time MEXT reviews your name, you already have a confirmed supervisor and full institutional backing. You are not a stranger in a pile of strangers.

Getting to that point requires a kind of strategic patience that most applicants skip entirely.

Sabiha did not mass-email professors. She built a shortlist based on research alignment first, then read recent papers carefully enough to understand not just what each professor was working on, but where her own interests could genuinely fit into their ongoing work.

When she wrote to them, the emails were short and specific: what she wanted to study, why their work was relevant to hers, and what her background brought to the conversation.

“Instead of trying to impress the professors,” she says, “showing alignment and seriousness helped me a lot.” That shift, from performing competence to demonstrating fit, is what she credits for finding a supervisor whose work connected with hers closely enough that the communication felt natural from the start.

Once the application was in, there was nothing left to do but wait.

And the waiting, she says, was the hardest part of everything. Not the proposal, not the professors’ emails, not the application itself. “It’s a long stretch of complete radio silence,” she says. “Months where you don’t hear anything, don’t know where you stand, and can’t really move forward or step back. Then one fine day, the results just appear.”

That uncertainty, suspended between effort already spent and an outcome entirely out of your hands, was harder to manage than any single step in the process.

There is a difference, Sabiha is careful to point out, between being academically strong and being fundable. They are not the same thing, and conflating them is one of the reasons strong candidates lose to stronger applications.

“My academic strength got my application considered,” she says. “Fundability got me selected.” Selection committees are not reviewing your past. They are making a calculated bet on your future: will this person finish, will they represent the programme well, will their work matter?

What signals fundability is not a long list of impressive titles. It is clarity of direction, consistency of story, and concrete evidence of execution.

“My research, my work experience, and my future aspirations aligned,” she says. “My journey was a continuation, not a random jump.”

The most common place she sees Bangladeshi MEXT applicants go wrong is the research proposal, specifically the gap between a title that sounds impressive and a proposal that actually holds up. “Most proposals sound good in titles, but don’t give a clear direction,” she says.

Unclear research questions, vague methodology, no defined contribution. “MEXT funds a real project, not just an interest.” A proposal that cannot answer what exactly you are studying, how you plan to study it, and what it will add to existing knowledge is not a proposal. It is a statement of enthusiasm, and enthusiasm alone does not get funded.

Life in Japan

She has been at Osaka University long enough now to understand what the experience actually is, as opposed to what she imagined from Bangladesh.

A lot of independent work: reading, refining ideas, data work, long stretches between check-ins. Fewer structured meetings, but deeper expectations. You manage your own pace. You think rigorously without anyone pushing you. “Japan offers depth and time to think,” she says. “The West often offers speed and structure.”

She does not frame one as better, it is a question of fit. Japan suits people who value patience, rigour, and genuinely independent thinking.

For students comparing options purely on prestige or geography, she has a quieter point to make: “In the end, it is not about a race to migrate to a first world country. It is about education and intent.”

Outside of research, life has built its own rhythm. She lives in the mountains. She cooks. She goes on nature walks and hikes home. The first days in Japan were a genuine shock. The sheer physical distance that counts as ordinary daily movement there was unlike anything she had experienced. Now it feels natural. Her food habits have shifted. She had always read that walking is the best exercise. Living it daily, she finally understands what that actually means.

Looking ahead

When she looks back at her years at IBA-JU, the events she attended, the hall life, the friends, she has no regrets about any of it. Her advice to students still inside those years is simple: see the bigger picture as early as you can, but do not miss where you actually are. Both are possible at the same time.

When she comes back from Osaka, she does not want to bring back a degree. She wants to bring back a way of thinking: research-driven decision-making in classrooms from the very beginning of a student’s journey, not as an abstract requirement but as a practical tool.

Support for students building businesses with evidence behind them, not just instinct. A bridge between academia and industry where research does not just get published, it gets used.

She started as a BBA student who wanted to be a teacher and was told, implicitly, that was not quite the right combination. She ends up a doctoral researcher at Osaka University, on a fully funded government scholarship, studying the exact questions her career never stopped asking.

Now, she is working on Green Marketing and Country of Origin Stereotypes. Finally, after storms and a range of diversified careers, the IBAite girl found her way as a researcher, hoping to become a lecturer one day.