On February 9th Nazarbayev University Alumni Association and Career and Advising Center held the first networking event for alumni and NU partners “After work”.
The aim of the event is to create a platform for communication and networking between alumni and potential employers in a cozy and informal atmosphere.
Guest speaker at the event was supposed to be Mr.Yerlan Karin, Director of the Kazakhstan Institute for Strategic Studies. However, due to his new appointment as Chairman of «Kazakhstan» TV and Radio Corporation Mr.Karin could not attend the event.
Nevertheless, guests enjoyed welcome drinks from hosts, participated in contests and games, and listened to standup show of Alexandr Merkul. It should be pointed out that all prizes were provided by alumni themselves, in particular, jewelry from Aisulu Sanat, founder of Sanat Jewelry and Certificates for Quest room “Vzaperti” from Olzhas Akbayev. Photos from the event are here.
Guest lecture by Schwarzman Scholars
Max Song, Yevgeniya Kim and Alibek Nurkesh
You all know about our alumnus Alibek Nurkesh who received Schwarzman Scholarship and currently studies at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China.
Alibek organized a study trip of his fellow Schwarzman Scholars to Kazakhstan and on January 26th Max Song, one of Schwarzman Scholars gave a guest lecture on “How to do hard things”. He talked on his experiences working in Silicon Valley, embracing a culture of risk-taking and failure, and the importance of grit and persistence for living a life of impact.
Max is 24 years old and grew up in Beijing, Shanghai, and Chicago.
In the last 5 years, Max Song has worked at NASA Ames Research Center, doing genetic engineering, taught as a Teaching Fellow at Singularity University, founded Brown University’s Student Accelerator, and took a leave of absence from school to work as the youngest data scientist at Ayasdi, a DARPA-funded machine learning company in Silicon Valley. His work took him on stints in New York (where he built predictive models for a Fortune 10 bank), London (on an electronic trading project), Paris (a personal AI company). During his time away from the university, he also co-wrote and published the Data Science Handbook (thedatasciencehandbook.com), which received a profile in Forbes and 10,000 downloads across 100 countries. He also founded the One Salon (onesalon.org), an intellectual community that grew from one chapter at Stanford to 16 cities around the world, from Paris to London, to Nairobi, Berne, Nanjing, New York and more. In December this year, he was awarded the 2016 Schwarzman Scholar, to pursue his dual passions in data and diplomacy. He is founding Prometheus Education (prometheuseducation.org), a next-generation globally distributed, an education project that is launching its pilot program past summer in Shenzhen, China’s Silicon Valley.
Bowling competition
On February 21, 2016, NU alumni gathered for the “Bowling Competition”. Alumni were divided into several teams and fought for the 1st place and interesting prizes. They came up with funny Team names and shared positive emotions during the game!
She took care of us for 5 years while studying at Nazarbayev University and continues this warm relationship even after graduation. It was three of us at the meeting: Aisulu Aitbekova (MIT), Ainur Kadyrbayeva (Boston University) and Azat Suleimenov (Boston University).
We were glad to hear good news about our alma-mater and it turns out that just in 6 months so many things have changed. As always, our University is developing dynamically. Foreign universities have begun to learn about NU as a breakthrough project in Central Asia and many of them are ready to cooperate.
We also talked about the “Bolashak” program and the achievements of first graduates all over the world. We hope that in a few years we will also make NU proud of us and our achievements will be recognized.
