Islamabad
Eager to collect best possible information on future prospects of higher education in the country, hundreds of students visited the first day of activity-filled ‘The News Education Expo 2016’ on Wednesday.
The two-day expo offers more than 45 stalls of best higher education institutions in the country managed by the education counsellors and volunteers equipped with the answer of every possible question regarding admissions, courses offered on the campus and scholarships. Each stall displays and provides information brochures, forms and prospectuses of the institutions besides registering the visitors for future collaboration. Some stalls offered candies, mugs, pens and other small gifts to facilitate visitors.
The visitors are welcomed by the sculptures of great national personalities and literary figures such as founder of Pakistan Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah, national poet Allama Muhammad Iqbal, Saadat Hassan Manto and Mirza Ghalib. These sculptures are contributed to the expo by the National Book Foundation (NBF) and are part of NBF’s first-ever museum in Pakistan established at NBF head office. NBF also offered a lucky draw of free books of Rs1,000 for 10 winners among the visitors.
“The turnover is much more than our expectations. All our officials are busy round the clock in dealing with the students,” said Urooj Abid, a representative of Bahria University. A lot of students took interest in the offer of online and on-the-spot admission facility at the Bahria University stall.
Talking about the kind of subjects most people inquired about, Urooj said that many students took interest in Psychology, Project Management, Media Studies and Electrical Engineering. “We hope that the information we provide will help them to take better decisions in future,” she said.
Her views were endorsed by the visitors. “Information is available online but many queries are answered in face-to-face interaction,” said Abdul Majid Qurashi while comparing the online available information with the information provided by the universities in the expo. Majid plans to do his PhD in Environmental Sciences. “It is not easy to search every university online for the subjects. Once I will point out the university, I will get the further information online,” he said.
Another student Saba Shahid said youth can access university information on net but most of the time, their queries are not addressed properly. “Directly meeting and interacting with university officials is very helpful. Most of my queries have been answered,” she said while leaving the Expo with bag full of brochures and leaflets. “I will study them in detail at home,” she said.
“Maximum number of students inquired about the information on scholarships,” said Shanza Alam at USEFP stall. She said that they are introducing visitors about the online advisory services in which the students are guided about the education opportunities in United States.
“Most students are under this impression that education is expensive in United States which is wrong. There are plenty of fully funded and partially funded merit and need based scholarship available for the students. The process of acquiring these opportunities takes time which is why we advice students to start applying a year or six months before they finish their degree here,” she said.
Saad Khan and Maaz Younus, representatives of FAST University, appreciated the timings of the expo. “This is admission season and students’ minds are full of queries at this time. It is great that they can have all this information under one roof,” they said.
The representatives of many institutions were excited to share new courses they offer on their campuses. “We are now offering LLB and LLM in collaboration with BPP University of UK. This will be the first internal UK degree offered in the country. Besides that, we will be introducing bachelors degree in Early Education for the first time in the country,” said Samya Kashif, head of Media, Events and Public Relations at Roots IVY.
Stalls from universities and colleges are not the only attraction for youth at the expo. The event is packed with exciting features, including 'Project Zone' where students displayed their impressive university projects, ranging from automatic loadshedding mechanism for energy conversation by Hamdard University to Platoon Early Warning System for Army by the Centre of Advanced Studies and Engineering.
Besides that, there were competitions of drama, painting, debate, quiz and photography among university students. A hall packed with excited students also listened to the inspiring talk of Zaidan Khan and Mustansar Tanoli on career-building and entrepreneurship. The display of project work by students of fashion designing at Iqra University and Roots IVY was also a centre of attraction for visitors.
