AIOU to hold first ever start-ups and career expo

ISLAMABAD

First-ever national-level ‘Projects, Start-ups and Career expo’ will be held here soon to provide a platform to graduate students, showcasing their projects, starting entrepreneurship and building their future career.

The three-fold event is being organized by the Allama Iqbal Open University (AIOU) to help the students to seek job opportunity or to start their own business.

While presiding over the event-review meeting held here on Tuesday, Vice Chancellor Prof. Dr. Shahid Siddiqui said the AIOU will act as a bridge between the students and the industrial sector for socio-economic development through innovative ideas.

An office of Research, Innovation and Commercialization (ORIC) has already been set up at the University for providing linkage between the researchers and the industries for projecting and taking benefit of new research and innovations in various disciplines.

Through this activity, the AIOU was going to provide the students an opportunity to directly interact with the job market and industry as well as corporate sector, the VC added.

About the concept and broader goals of the event, he said they wanted to be a helping hand for the graduates to start their own business on the basis of research work and new innovation.

Our brotherly country, China, has set up a best example in this connection to exploit strength of their youth, ensuring a better future, both at individual and national level.

“We are planning to hold this multidisciplinary event within next couple of months and expecting that the students, not only from the AIOU but other Universities as well, will be participating,” he added.

It was noted that the graduate students around the country was facing the problem of unemployment, as well as becoming burden on the national economy and it was felt that the Universities needed to realize this challenge and work closely with industry and corporate sector to fill this gap.

The AIOU, being the Mega University in the public sector wished to fulfill its responsibility helping students in career making. Over the last two and half years, the AIOU has been focusing on promoting research culture in the country, through various means including publishing research journals and holding national and international conferences. In a short span of time, eleven research journals were published and about twenty conferences were arranged.

In case of the project expo, the university will provide space and required infrastructure to the students to exhibit their research-based projects. The University will invite the relevant industry and corporate sector to understand their needs and issues. It will pave the way for taking up meaningful applied research at the academic level.

About the start-up idea, Dr. Shahid Siddiqui said this will enable the students to think beyond the traditional job market searching and to bring novel ideas, so as to become real entrepreneurs. In regard to career expo, the students could come up with their resume and personal goals statements to share the same with the participating industrial representatives to find job opportunities or to get an idea, as how to start own entrepreneurship.