Timing was everything for this new family.
Narmin Aydamirova WG25 and Fardi Rahimli WG25 met as undergraduates in their home country, Azerbaijan. After they got married in 2019, they knew MBAs or PhDs were on the horizon.
“I got in first, before he did.” Aydamirova says of being accepted to Wharton. Rahimli was waitlisted, which presented a challenge. Then Aydamirova found out she was pregnant. After she deferred her admission for a year, Rahimli made the Wharton cut on the first round, and the two were able to start the program together, with then-15-month-old Aras in tow.
“We brought him, our cats, and five suitcases across the ocean,” says Aydamirova.
Already in the strategic mindset of an MBA student, Rahimli thought the best way to optimize his and his wife’s schedules so they could spend as much time as possible with their son was to request to be put in different cohorts.
“If we were in the same cohort, we would have overlapping schedules, especially in the pre-term and with the core classes,” he explains. “And I’m glad we did that, because in the first couple of weeks after he started daycare, he got sick quite often, and we had to skip classes so we could stay with him.”
Before Aras started daycare, both of his grandmas took turns traveling to the U.S. to help out, with each staying one semester. This sparked a bit of a culture shock with American classmates.
Read more at Wharton Magazine.
Posted: June 13, 2025
