Maryam Mian knows how to handle a high-pressure environment. Whether she’s facing a national champion on the squash court or a technical cold call in a finance seminar, the student-athlete relies on a single guiding principle: Stay adaptable.
The second-year’s drive is deeply rooted in her family history. Her grandparents were educators who narrowly escaped the violence of the 1947 Partition, when British India was divided into the independent states of Pakistan and India. Their stories of survival and the value they placed on education set a high bar for her early on. Her father provided a modern blueprint for this ambition when he moved from Pakistan to the United States to pivot from aeronautical engineering into business.
Watching him build a successful career in private equity helped Maryam imagine a future for herself in finance. “My dad and I are very similar people,” Maryam says, noting that his genuine engagement with his work inspired her to look for a similarly dynamic path.
Her journey into the world of squash followed a similar trajectory of having to prove herself.
As the only girl among three brothers, she found her competitive spark early. “It was a way to prove myself to them,” she explains. That instinct stayed with her through the recruiting process. Even though she was a strong junior player, she worried at first that a spot at UVA might be out of reach because the roster was so formidable.
“They were initially a lot better on paper than I was,” she recalls. At the time she felt like the coach was taking a chance on me, but coming to UVA and seeing the level of commitment every member of the team, she was quickly motivated. “I wouldn’t be the person I am without the team,” she says crediting UVA Squash’s strong culture and the care shown by her coaches and captains.
Maryam leaned into an intensive training environment and began to reshape the mental side of her game.
She describes her younger self as high energy and sometimes too caught up in the heat of the moment, especially after losing a point.
To steady herself, she developed specific routines that have proven helpful. The first is a double-breath technique to reset after making a mistake on the court. “I take a double breath and then completely forget about the point before,” she says. She also journals before matches, eventually condensing her strategy into just three words to keep her mind clear during the “frenzied activity” of a match. “Now I’m using that energy to my advantage and staying focused,” she says.
That focus is paying off in her burgeoning career as well. Maryam has secured a private equity internship with AE Industrial Partners for this summer and is looking forward to a role on the leveraged finance team at Goldman Sachs in the summer of 2027. She sees a direct parallel between the “cold call” culture of the McIntire classroom and the high stakes of the squash court, and says that her time in athletics helped her collaboration skills at
In both worlds, she is learning to embrace the challenge of dealing with whatever comes her way.
McIntire and squash [can be seen as] a metaphor for the professional world,” she says. “I know I’m going to be put on the spot, but being able to adapt is a skill that I’ve gained.”
