Rija Irfan

Ms. Rija Irfan has a diverse background in the field of education, startup ecosystem, Pakistan women’s football, media and marketing. She is currently working at Roots Millennium Future World School & College Bahria Town Rawalpindi as a Student Affairs Counsellor. As a student affairs counsellor she is responsible for campus life, clubs and societies and events. She also motivates and empowers students by providing opportunities to harness student’s skills in community service, sports, event management, Stem, Microsoft and entrepreneurship related activities through the various clubs and societies at the school. She is also successfully running the schools social media pages and has a good insight in to social media analytics. Currently all the activities she is involved in at school support learning and holistic development both through in classroom activity based and project based learning and beyond classroom club and societies activities. She has previously worked as a Director of Operations at a game development studio Dreamnode Studios that was incubated as part of the 7th batch of startups at the Nest I/o, a technology incubator in Pakistan with partners like Google for Entrepreneurs, Samsung and a supporting grant from the US State Department (founded by Jehan Ara) where she got exposure to the startup ecosystem of Pakistan. She also participated in ITCN Asia during this tenure. She also participated in the Y-combinator Accelerator program and successfully graduated from Y-combinator as Director of Operations of Dreamnode Studios. In the field of Education she has worked as a curriculum developer science at LACAS Lahore and was responsible for the central science curriculum for all the branches of LACAS. She has also worked at NIXOR in Karachi as a full time administrator, student affairs officer where she oversaw all student related activities, curriculum development with the teachers, she also built an admin resource and mentored students on MUNs and debates along with the coach. In the field of sports she was the coordinator and assistant manager for the women division at Karachi United Football academy in Karachi and started oversaw the training programs for women. She was also part of the marketing and sponsorship team and created marketing campaigns for the trials and team recruits and competitions. During her tenure she had a string of achievements under the belt in the first year as a team which are as follows: 1.Runners up PFF National Womens Championship 2.Runners up State Bank of Pakistan Womens Championship 3.Runners up Grand Womens Cup 4.Winners of Standard Chartered Womens Football Tournament As an administrator she is an expert at employee management. As a leader or a manager she is empathetic, kind yet assertive and has a strong work ethic. She focuses on employee strengths and helps empower the workforce thereby increasing work efficiency and team motivation. As an employee she can be called as somewhat of a jack of all trades, as her vast and diverse portfolio makes her fit for multiple hats in an organization. Ms Rija believes her greatest strength is her grit and because of this trait she is able to objectively look at goals and once she aims to do something she makes it happen. She is a very solution oriented person and does not look at problems as road blocks rather as a puzzle piece waiting to be solved. ​​​​​