So she began sending applications to universities abroad, but few if any arrived during the 1990s[5] On December 31, 1998, she and her family moved to Montreal, Canada as part of a selective immigration program, as the country was looking for computer scientists.

[6] Before moving to Canada, her father was an executive at the Ministry of Planning, and her mother a professor of operational research at the National Institute of Informatics in Algiers.

She declares that her family belonged to that intellectual class that had little money and whose only wealth was education[5] She was shocked when she arrived in Montreal, having spent her youth in a country plagued by civil war.

After three years in Canada, the ghosts of her past resurface, and she recounts how she sometimes even has panic attacks, standing motionless and stunned in the middle of the street[5] recalling a time when she missed a bus that exploded a few meters away.

A few years later, she reconnected with her homeland, returning to see her loved ones with arms full of gifts[5] After settling in, she continued her studies in Algeria, having passed her baccalaureate at the age of 16.