Best Advice Giver: Imaan Mirza

It’s 8:15 a.m., well before waking hour for most Harvard students, and Capital One Cafe is nearly empty — except for Imaan Mirza ’25. She sits in the back corner, wearing a muted paisley headscarf. Her large brown eyes, rimmed in dark liner, are bright and not at all groggy.

“This is my spot,” she says. “When I look back at Harvard, I’ll probably think of Capital One Cafe as being a place I spent a ridiculous amount of time in.” She laughs, something she often does after finishing a sentence.

After being nominated as Best Advice Giver, she looked up the superlative’s past winners out of curiosity. The awardee from 2022 also chose Capital One Cafe for their interview. “I’m telling you,” she says, “there’s something special about this establishment.”

Imaan goes to the cafe nearly every day, getting a discounted iced vanilla latte (“I can’t drink black coffee or anything grown up”) and sitting at her go-to table, the one we’re at right now. She often brings her friends, doing work, or chatting, or — obviously — dispensing advice.

Imaan talks with her hands, moving them around the table as she speaks. I notice her sticker-clad computer and ask her about them. It turns out they quite literally represent the story of her life.

She has a dark-blue rectangle with ragged edges, which she explains is the outline of Pakistan — Imaan was born in Lahore. There’s also a green and white road sign with the word Jeddah, the city in Saudi Arabia where she moved with her family when she was two. “It’s right by the red coast and the Red Sea,” she says. “It was a really good childhood home.”

Next is a blue iMessage bubble, reading “I’d rather be in Fishers,” the Indiana suburb she’s lived in since she was 14. “I’m very proudly from Fishers,” she says. “It’s like Fishers is the center of my existence.”

Though Imaan would rather be in Fishers, her roommate Maryam S.K. Tourk ’25, a former Crimson Blog editor, says Capital One Cafe is Imaan’s “second home on campus.”

“I’m very Capital One ambassador,” Imaan says. “Not even for the bag, just for the coffee, the vibes.” (To be clear, the individuals quoted in this article are not paid spokespeople.)

I ask Imaan why she thinks her friends go to her for advice. “This is hard,” she says. “It feels quite vain to be like, ‘This is why my friends think I’m a good advice giver.’” Maybe, she posits, it’s because she’s “painfully optimistic.” “If anyone’s in a relationship, I will tell you that they’re end game,” she says. “I think it’s somewhat gullible at times.”

She may be optimistic, but Imaan doesn’t just tell people what they want to hear. “I’m a very blunt person,” she explains.

“I really like transparency, because I expect the same from my friends,” she says. “One of my worst fears is, ‘Are my friends covering up the truth to just look out for my feelings?’” She despises the compliment sandwich, a technique for delivering criticism that goes: good, bad, good. To Imaan, whatever she says to her friends — “it’s not bad, it’s not good.”

“She’s the kind of person to assuage your fears and tell you that whatever you think is a big deal is actually just part of the universe,” says her friend Annika Inampudi ’25, a Crimson Magazine editor.

Imaan’s guidance is so good that friends will even ask her about topics for which she feels she has a “lack of credentials.”

“This is so bizarre to me, but people come to me for romantic advice sometimes,” she says. “Practically speaking, I have zero qualifications in that department.”

Outside of Capital One Cafe, Imaan studies History and Literature (she’s writing her thesis on women’s periodicals in 1960s Pakistan and their connection to the nation’s state-building project), is a features editor of The Harvard Advocate, and leads trips for the First Year Outdoor Program. “Freshmen are so good about being optimistic, and it’s quite infectious,” she says. “I just saw a FOPer yesterday, and I feel so much love for them and a deep investment in their futures.”

Walk down Mt. Auburn street with Imaan, and you’ll be forced to keep stopping — she’ll run into a friend every few feet. One time, Inampudi was studying in the Barker Center Cafe with Imaan when, “every three minutes, a new person was walking into Barker Cafe and say hi to her,” Inampudi says. “I was like, oh my god, I have a paper to write.”

Imaan might know just about every student walking through the Barker Center, but she always makes time for her closest friends. “Every time I’m frustrated by life — which I feel like is often — or stressed about something, she’s always there,” Inampudi says. “Not only that, she’ll come with a smile on her face, and she’ll be like, ‘Let’s go get Peet’s.’”

—Associate Magazine Editor Sage S. Lattman can be reached at sage.lattman@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @sagelattman.