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.”
All three family members were involved on campus, from the Wharton Sports Business Club (Rahimli, left) to the Wharton Kids Club (Aras, middle) to Wharton Women in Business (Aydamirova, right).
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.
“For me, the biggest difference in culture was how involved parents are,” Aydamirova says. “Azerbaijan is really small, so whenever I needed some help, my mom was always there. My mother-in-law was always there. Extended families, very involved. There’s a village, you know? And to come here and see that parents have to build that support from the ground up, I’m like, ‘How do they do that?’ It made me realize how much we were taking for granted.”
As Aras’s parents talk about him over Zoom, it becomes evident that he has skipped his nap. He bounces around the room, parroting different words, like “academic.” This is the same energetic three-year-old that Aydamirova held as she walked across the stage to receive her diploma in May. Plenty of individual Wharton parents had walked with their kids, but Aydamirova and Rahimli were in different cohorts and would be called to the stage separately. Rahimli decided: “Let’s make sure that we do it once.” So mom, dad, and son all walked together to pick up Aydamirova’s diploma. After that, Rahimli had to go up a second time to get his. (Friends joked that he got his diploma twice.) The moment was a hit on social media with other Wharton parents.
The couple values the connections they made through the School. “Because of the family commitments from both of us, we had limited social bandwidth,” Rahimli says. “We wanted to increase our potential networking opportunities and get to know as many people as possible.”
They even met a few fellow Azerbaijanis, including Fidan Karimova G24 WG24, who helped them get oriented to their new way of life. They thought it was only fair they pay it forward, so they recently toured Philly with a member of the Class of 2027 who’s from their homeland.
As they settle in their new town of Seattle, the marathon pace of the past two years has finally slowed. Rahimli landed a job in consulting, and Aydamirova is still recruiting, so they plan to stay on the West Coast for now. They have a group of friends — a mix from within Wharton and outside of Wharton — and they’re searching for a daycare for Aras, who is learning both English and Azerbaijani. Who knows? He may be building his Wharton résumé already.
