Inclusion Is No Sacrifice: John Wooden Global Leadership Fellow Sana Rahim

By Carolyn Gray Anderson

Sana Rahim (FEMBA ’19) is the recipient of a 2017 John Wooden Global Leadership Fellowship, which rewards students who embody Coach Wooden’s leadership ideals and commitment to improving the lives of others. And if, as Wooden believed, adversity is an asset, Rahim has risen to the challenge — primarily in the interest of helping other people.

Rahim is an observant Muslim American whose parents hail from Pakistan. She is a brown-skinned woman pursuing an MBA. She grew up a distinct minority in the Wyoming town of Laramie, and later moved with her family to Naperville, Illinois, where she proudly became her high school’s first homecoming queen in hijab. In adulthood, amid worldwide trends toward divisiveness along political, religious, gender and cultural lines, she has traveled widely and faced her share of prejudice and setbacks.

But the former sales manager for industrial supply company McMaster-Carr says, “Although my ‘roots’ presented me with a number of challenges, they motivated me.” Her immigrant parents instilled in her a great sense of achievement, worthiness and responsibility. These influences protected her from insecurity.