MONTREAL — When Jad Albasha arrived in Quebec in 2016 as a 21-year-old fleeing his war-torn home of Syria, he landed in a snow-covered world that spoke French, a language in which he did not understand a single word.

But now it rolls off the tongue as if Albasha has lived here all of his life.

When he graduates on Saturday with a master’s degree in civil engineering from Polytechnique Montréal, it will mark yet another milestone that shows how far he’s come.

He went from being a third-year civil engineering student in Syria, just six months away from earning a degree, to wondering if he would be stuck working at a grocery store in Laval, north of Montreal, forever.

“The road is long. I sometimes wondered ‘am I going to get there?’ ” Albasha said in an interview. “Nine years later, we s

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