Neshay Aqueel: Building A Global Career Through The Scheinman Institute
“The lessons I learned during my time at the Scheinman Institute on Conflict Resolution continue to serve me.” These are the words of Neshay Aqueel, whose journey into the field of conflict resolution led her from the UK, to Ithaca and then to her native Pakistan. She has found that: “You do not have to be a mediator or a negotiator to be invited to confront or address conflict.”
Growing up surrounded by talented lawyers, including a chief justice of Pakistan, Aqueel always knew she wanted to become a lawyer. She earned her law degree at the University of Kent, in the UK, a school with a critical approach that “encouraged us to ask not only what the law is, but what it should be.” The law school offered classes in mediation and arbitration, giving Aqueel formative exposure to alternative dispute resolution.
Aqueel’s interest in dispute resolution and international labor led her to apply to the Master of Industrial and Labor Relations (MILR) program at Cornell’s ILR School. An accomplished public speaker and debater, she was also drawn to ILR for its speech and debate team. As an undergraduate student, she was shortlisted for a prestigious national public speaking tour, traveling across the United States for two and a half months. One of the stops was Ithaca, and the experience left a lasting impression. She found community in the speech and debate team, which became a central aspect of her time at Cornell.
As a student at ILR, Aqueel served as a teaching assistant to Professor Sam Nelson and a research assistant to Professor David Lipsky, who became her mentor. Lipsky was a renowned conflict resolution, negotiation and collective bargaining scholar, a former dean of the ILR School and the founding director of the Scheinman Institute.
Under the supervision of Professor Lipsky, Aqueel conducted research on corporate social responsibility in the workplace and participated in roundtables on workplace conflict, deepening her understanding of how power and interpersonal dynamics shape disputes.
Her course work included an arbitration class taught by Marty Scheinman, the founder of the Scheinman Institute, where she learned that “effective negotiators are not the loudest voices in the room, but often the ones who say less and listen more.”
Today, Aqueel works as legal counsel for a major global corporation, having served as the Head of Legal External Affairs in Pakistan and now in Malaysia. She remains closely connected to ILR as an alumni leader, hosting events and staying engaged with the community that helped develop her career. Her Scheinman experience impacted her both professionally and personally. “I learned how to approach my work and my life -- not what to be, but how to be.”
