When Subah IMAMI’15 was growing up, she loved the arts. But with what she calls a “stereotypical Asian” upbringing, she knew she had to pursue a career in one of four areas to please her parents: “Do I want to be a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer or go into business?” she says, laughing.
The Bangladeshi-born student chose business, applying to only one school: New York University’s Stern School of Business. She vividly remembers finding out on December 15 of her last year at Branksome Hall that she was accepted. “Oh my god! I got into NYU,” she remembers thinking, just before throwing up. “I just remember the sheer relief I felt, like my life wasn’t over.”
At the time, she says, she couldn’t imagine a life without the friends she made at Branksome. “I started there in Grade 7. We were together from the ages of 13 to 18. I felt: Who am I if I’m not in this environment? Who am I if I’m not wearing a green blazer?”
Happily, her guidance counsellor, Ms. Stumborg, calmed her down and even rescheduled an exam. “Girl, you’re going to college, so we’ll just delay the exam for another time,” she remembers Ms. Stumborg telling her. “Your health is important.”
And not only did she get into NYU, but she did her business studies, including a minor in studio art for her soul, on a full scholarship. That led her to a career that gives her the best of both worlds in sunny Los Angeles, where she works as a senior associate, content strategy and analysis, with Warner Bros. Discovery.
Her job entails analyzing pitches for TV programs to see whether they make sense for the company to greenlight. There is a lot of strategizing on what pitches will go ahead, she explains. And it’s not just about whether they will make the company money. For example, a show might not be profitable but still be greenlit because it will keep talent in house. Or it may fill the demand of a niche market within the vast subscriber market.
But there is one thing that drives it all, she says. “We know that people want new content, fresh content and content that’s in the zeitgeist that everyone’s talking about.”
It’s a job that taps into not only her interests but her life, in a way the banking industry—which she’d originally been heading into—never could. Indeed, it was while she was doing a summer internship from NYU at Goldman Sachs that she recognized two things about herself. First, she realized that long banking hours were not for her. “I just wasn’t a good cultural fit,” says Subah, who places a high value on a work-life balance that gives her time for things that bring her joy.
In pursuit of that, and what she calls the “whimsy” of life, she takes art and pottery classes and volunteers for cat shelters and, importantly, for NYU’s 15,000 alumni members who live in Los Angeles. That work won her a New Volunteer of the Year award from NYU’s alumni organization.
The second insight was that she wanted to be “on the inside” making strategic decisions, not on the outside as she was at Goldman, evaluating decisions that were already made.
“At home, the goal of school was to have a good grade-point average. But my teachers said the goal is for you to really understand what you want to do and who you want to be.”
As it happened, her next internship was at NBCUniversal Media, and she knew then that she had found a career path that would meld her business acumen and skills with her desire to work in a creative field.
Moreover, she was at NBC while it was creating its Peacock streaming service. “First of all, my homework was watching TV, right?” says Subah. “I was like, this is fun, this is exciting. I felt like I could naturally talk about the subject matter without feeling like I was out of my depth, or I needed to study up, because at the end of the day, I was a target audience for the product,” she says. “I am a user of every streaming platform, and I am a part of the culture.”
In New York City, “I was a woman in her young 20s living in a high cost-of-living area,” she says. TV shows like Sex and the City were targeted to her demographic. “I’m who you are looking for with a bunch of diversity tags on me,” she laughs.
So, when an opportunity at The Walt Disney Company came up in Los Angeles, she went for it. It was April when Subah flew to balmy California from a wet and chilly New York City to interview for a job as an analyst in corporate strategy and business development. “The skies are clear, there are palm trees! Oh my god, this could be life for me!” she remembers thinking.
Landing at Disney, she recalls, “I was star-struck.” But she still wanted more influence on the strategic decision-making of what programs got greenlit, and when she saw the Warner Bros. job almost four years into her employment at Disney, she felt it was an even better fit.
And it was, but life in the fast and demanding world of entertainment isn’t all fun and games. “It hasn’t been the easiest ride through multiple roles and restructurings,” Subah says of the seismic changes in the entertainment industry, where conglomerates vie to buy up one another. Indeed, even as she spoke, three industry giants were bidding to buy parts or all of Warner Bros. Discovery, with the battle later evidently won after much drama by Paramount Skydance Corp. Not that that worried her: “Regardless of what company we are, they are going to need their content strategy team.”
Subah says she isn’t allowed to say what TV shows she may have worked on and recommended. But she gets a kick when she’s with her friends watching shows that she had recommended for greenlighting, without them knowing.
Subah’s quick move up the ladder in the cutthroat industry of entertainment and media conglomerates is even more remarkable considering the only English she could speak when she arrived in Toronto from Dhaka, Bangladesh, was what she had learned growing up watching reruns of the TV series Friends. If that doesn’t sound like a foreshadowing of her current career, consider that Friends was made by Warner Bros., she jokes now.
When she started life in Toronto, she was in Grade 6, in the public school system, struggling, “and then, thankfully, Branksome took a chance on me.” She credits Ms. Mouftah, the teacher who interviewed her, for making her case. “I just felt very safe,” she says of the school’s diverse, inclusive environment, where she felt “seen” for the first time since arriving in Canada
And the support didn’t end there. Subah remembers being mentored and supported by several teachers at the school. “At home, the goal of school was to have a good grade-point average. But my teachers said the goal is for you to really understand what you want to do and who you want to be”—and, she says, they helped her get there. “I just felt like I had a lot of trust from my teachers, which was important,” says Subah, adding with a smile: “I don’t know if you can tell, but I’m a bit quirky.”
While Branksome helped her trust herself and gave her strength and independence, she leans heavily, too, on her culture, something she appreciates even more because of what her parents went through. “They saw the horrors of war,” she says, referring to the 1971 Bangladesh war of independence. They fought for their rights, and now she says she’s just as determined to stand up for her rights. “I will always serve that purpose; I will never back down from that.”
She’s thankful to her mom and dad now, too, for encouraging her to head into business, not the arts. “They created a life for me where I can actually focus on thriving instead of surviving,” she says of her parents, who grew up in varying degrees of poverty in Bangladesh.
“I am so blessed that my dad—one of 18 children in his family—was able to get the success he did in his career, so I could go to a school like Branksome.
“The lessons I learned there have carried me through my life and career.”
