FAEZA KAZMIER • ENGLAND
Kazmier’s parents raised her to know that if she wanted to achieve her dreams, it would take nothing less than hard work and pure dedication. Though, granted, her ravenous appetite for knowledge of science and reconstructive surgery no doubt propelled her efforts. Kazmier’s parents Drs. Muhammad and Fatema Rashid came to the U.S. from the small country of Bangladesh. Though it’s a very modern and proWestern country, Kazmier says her parents “were raised in the Third World country you’d imagine — a small hut with a tin roof. That was their home. But their families knew that education was the ticket to help them to be able to get out of that.” A top student in the country at the time, Kazmier’s father received an engineering scholarship. Shortly after her parents’ marriage, the couple moved to England, where Kazmier was born. As an academician, Muhammad furthered his education from an undergraduate degree to a master’s and a PhD in England.
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Later, the family made many moves: to Malta, several smaller countries in Africa, Connecticut (where Kazmier attended preschool), and then Canada, before the family immigrated to the United States. Also highly educated, coming through poverty, Fatema had been a practicing physician and chose to set aside her practice for the time being when the family arrived to Canada, to invest first in her children. “I didn’t realize the implications of that sacrifice my mom made for us, until I became a physician and surgeon,” Kazmier says. Kazmier was in the fifth grade when the family arrived to the town of Munster in northwest Indiana. But it was shortly thereafter, when her father accepted a position to teach at Purdue and the family moved to Fort Wayne, that Kazmier’s career was set in motion. As a freshman in high school, she was exposed to the possibilities of careers in the medical field. “I was very blessed to have a biology teacher at that time,”
Kazmier remembers, “who said, ‘Faeza, I really think you’re great at sciences. I think you should consider something in the science background.’” Volunteering at the local hospital shortly thereafter, by the ninth grade Kazmier had seen her first surgery, a cardiothoracic operation. “This was when they had glass windows that you could watch through,” she recalls. “So I watched, and thought, ‘Ah, that looks so neat!’ But I had no idea what it meant to become a doctor.” After volunteering in a hospital, Kazmier had seen enough surgeries to know the medical field was the one she was ready to embark upon. At the time, equipped with college credits having attended classes for free at Purdue, she applied to several medical programs receiving students straight from high school and ultimately landed at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and then Albany Medical College. “That’s when I became exposed to plastic surgery,” says Kazmier, “and it was a
TH E L A K E L A N D E R
As a female plastic and reconstructive surgeon at Watson Clinic Women’s Center, Kazmier is a part of the 12% of females in her medical field.