All Answers: Re: [pakgrid] I hope this happens in Pakistan too

Agree, we've all had similar experiences.

Let's get to solutions. Who will fix and how. We can take IBA and NUST as cases to present to other institutions.

But we need volunteers from within Academia who can bring this up within their Institutions. Presenting it as a competition with IBA and NUST may draw the top managements attention.

I'm afraid that this extremely important issue can easily end up being another drawing room discussion.

- Fahad
Folio3 Pvt. Ltd.
www.folio3.com

On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 11:46 AM, Uzair sukhera <uzairasif@hotmail.com> wrote:

The respect foreign universities give to students is remarkable. I remember how Cornell professors were all praise for us at Convocation. This creates a sense of ownership and students vow to keep coming back and donate to university.

On the contrary universities in Pakistan treat you as if you are just students "who know nothing". Even at premier institute of nust my class fellows got treated so badly on convocations that they pledged not to come back ever to their college. Those who dared coming back for visiting are turned back from gates quoting security or other stupid reasons. With resentment levels so high it gets so difficult to persuade alumni to donate back to university.

It is another matter of shame that our universities do not want to spend on alumni affairs office. It took nust more than ten years to realize alumni's importance and officially endorse the alumni bodies who had been working on volunteer basis (to gather scholarships and help out students with financial needs to get along with the education without dropping out). Another obstacle that universities need to overcome is to allow alumni to get their name on the buildings they contribute for. All buildings are named after alumni who donate at Cornell. Even the founders of tata group gets away with lot of publicity in Cornell for his donations.

It is worth mentioning here that alumni also need to get proactive here. We implemented the concepts of class scholarships at nust and this got good response from graduating classes as they got sense of ownership and competition with each other.

Summary of the debate is that not only do universities need to pursue marketting effectively they also need to improve their culture and treat students with due respect to infuse sense of ownership among students.

Uzair
Project engineer
Lutron electronics
Coopersburg, PA

Sent from my Verizon Wireless 4GLTE Phone

-----Original message-----
From: mansoor malik <manmalik@hotmail.com>
To: pakgrid@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Mon, Jan 2, 2012 15:18:04 GMT+00:00
Subject: RE: [pakgrid] I hope this happens in Pakistan too - my US Alma Mater recives $350 million

Our Universities have a very laid back approach and are not marketing themselves pro-actively. We had set up a full fledged Marketing Organization at NUST for the first time in a public sector university in 2008 where we carried out the branding of our university including its New Emblem with the caption DEFINING FUTURES before moving to our new campus in H-12, Islamabad.

Pakistani parents are remitting more than US $ 2 Billion every year on their childrens' tuition fees to universities in USA/Europe/Australia and Higher Education has now become an industry. Ten percent of this amount can turn our universities around. There is hardly any road shows to attract investors/alumni/philanthropists by our universities. In the existing tight budget situation, our universities have to come out from their cocoonic comfort zones and market themselves aggressively to pursue their Innovation Programmes and build relations with their local communities.

To start with lets encourage them to establish their Marketing Organizations as a first step by taking a leaf out of the road shows carried out by foreign universities on our soil to attract the US $ 2 Billion annual market of ours.

Engr. Mansoor Malik
Founding Director General Marketing & Industrial Research Organization (MIRO), NUST Islamabad (2008)
Founding Director General Technology Incubation Center (TIC), NUST Islamabad (2003-2007)
Founding Vice-President TiE Islamabad Chapter

EMSQUARE

To: pakgrid@yahoogroups.com
From: zahirsyed@gmail.com
Date: Fri, 23 Dec 2011 15:04:32 +0500
Subject: Re: [pakgrid] I hope this happens in Pakistan too - my US Alma Mater recives $350 million

You are absolutely right that this does not happen in Pakistan to tune that it does outside. However, there are some cases where this has happened and is happening as we communicate. IBA got a US $ 10 M to build a 14 story building at the city campus from one Alumnus and is now currently raising billions of Rupees from its Alumni and the industry.

But for this most of our universities are to be blamed also. When I was at MIT, I saw that all summer long the institute was organizing meetings of Class of 1940, ...., 2000, ... and so on and raising millions of dollars. Our universities have to wear the fund raising hat and go out there and raise monies with multiple methods.

Regards

Dr. Zahir Ali Syed
Co-Chair MIT Enterprise Forum of Pakistan

On Fri, Dec 23, 2011 at 11:13 AM, ziaimran <zia.imran@gmail.com> wrote:

I hope someday this generosity rubs off on Pakistani billionaires too.

For inspiration share with our wealthy friends.

Cornell Alumnus Is Behind $350 Million Gift to Build Science School in City
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

The donor whose $350 million gift will be critical in building Cornell University's new high-tech graduate school on Roosevelt Island is Atlantic Philanthropies, whose founder, Charles F. Feeney, is a Cornell alumnus who made billions of dollars through the Duty Free Shoppers Group.

Mr. Feeney, 80, has spent much of the last three decades giving away his fortune, with large gifts to universities all over the world and an unusual degree of anonymity. Cornell officials revealed in 2007 that he had given some $600 million to the university over the years, yet nothing on its Ithaca campus — where he graduated from the School of Hotel Management in 1956 — bears Mr. Feeney's name.

The $350 million gift, the largest in the university's history, was announced on Friday, but the donor was not named. Officials at Atlantic Philanthropies confirmed on Monday evening that it was Mr. Feeney, a native of Elizabeth, N.J., who is known for his frugality — he flies coach, owns neither a home nor a car, and wears a $15 watch — as well as his philanthropic generosity, particularly to medical research.

"This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity," Mr. Feeney said in a statement released by Atlantic Philanthropies, "to create economic and educational opportunity on a transformational scale."

The statement echoed what Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said hours earlier at a news conference officially crowning Cornell, with its partner, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, the winner of an intense international competition to build the new graduate school.

"Today will be remembered as a defining moment," Mr. Bloomberg said, making official what had been apparent since Cornell's chief rival, Stanford University, withdrew its bid for the campus on Friday. "In a word, this project is going to be transformative."

Revealing details of the $2 billion plan for the first time, Mr. Bloomberg and the presidents of the two universities said it would include a $150 million venture capital fund for start-up companies that agree to remain in New York for three years, as well as math and science education support for 10,000 city children. They estimated that building the campus would create 20,000 construction jobs, and that it would spin off 600 new businesses over the next generation, creating 30,000 more jobs and as much as $1.4 billion in tax revenue. The city is providing the land and up to $100 million in infrastructure improvements.

"New York City is positioned to become the new technology capital of the world," said David J. Skorton, the Cornell president, whose personal lobbying and fund-raising commitment to the project proved important in winning the competition.

That has long been a goal for Mr. Bloomberg, who noted that the city had only recently surpassed much-smaller Boston in attracting venture capital for high-tech start-ups, and that such businesses here face a chronic shortage of engineers.

Mr. Bloomberg has repeatedly said he could choose more than one winner. He emphasized during the announcement that the city was still negotiating with other schools in the Applied Sciences NYC initiative: Columbia University, which wants to make a new science center part of its expansion in West Harlem; Carnegie Mellon University, whose joint proposal with Steiner Studios is for a parcel the city offered in the Brooklyn Navy Yard; and a consortium led by New York University focused on Downtown Brooklyn.

"We're eager and hopeful that we'll be able to find ways to help them realize their proposals," he said.

He declined to cite specifics when asked about Stanford's decision to drop out, though he said that he had spoken to the university president, John Hennessy, and that he hoped Stanford might some day come to New York. "The program that we want may not exactly fit what they want," he said.

City officials spent two months poring over 10,000 pages of documents submitted in seven proposals from 17 institutions. Mr. Bloomberg picked the Cornell-Technion plan, he said, because it was "far and away the boldest and most ambitious" and had an "incredibly aggressive schedule."

The two universities promise to start offering classes next September in temporary space, and to complete 300,000 square feet of space on Roosevelt Island by 2017 and more than 2 million square feet by 2037. Plans call for about 280 faculty members and 2,500 students in master's and doctoral programs, a larger contingent than the universities had proposed a few months ago.

The schools have also committed to training at least 200 teachers each year in science education.

The universities plan to organize the campus around three overlapping, shifting "hubs": technologies for "connective media," applicable to everything from finance to social media; health care industries; and sustainable development, chosen in part to mesh with the city's existing strengths.

Each institution brought critical ingredients to winning the competition. Cornell needed Technion, which has played a role in Israel similar to the role Stanford has had in Silicon Valley, supplying talent and resources that help hundreds of companies set up shop near its Haifa campus. And Technion needed a local partner: "6,000 miles, the Atlantic, the Mediterranean — too far," the school's president, Peretz Lavie, noted at the news conference.

Asked what role he might play in financing the campus, the mayor, a billionaire, drew laughter when he said, drily, "You assume that when they make the phone calls, I'd be on the list."

Topping the list is Mr. Feeney, whose Atlantic Philanthropies had assets of $2.1 billion at the end of 2010, and has announced plans to give it all away over the next decade. The philanthropy was created in 1982 by Mr. Feeney, who has transferred virtually all of his assets to the charity. It has recently become involved with human rights causes. Last year, Atlantic distributed $285 million; the year before, $375 million.