While welcoming the Minister, Acting President of NU Ilesanmi Adesida noted that the hall gathered a new generation of students of the leading university of Kazakhstan, which successfully fulfills its five strategic objectives – leadership in the formation of the education system, academic and scientific leadership, which is expressed in publications in the top scientific journals of the world, the creation and development of the model of integrated academic health care system, and the promotion of innovation.
In his lecture, Minister Sayasat Nurbek told the students about the achievements in Kazakhstan’s higher education system, highlighted the challenges facing it, and discussed the role of NU in this process.
“NU is crucial and ready for some preparation for this giant wave of innovation that is coming and inevitable. A revolution in technology drives an energy revolution, and huge changes have occurred in medicine and material science. Quantum computing and artificial intelligence are accelerating all of these changes because the formulas and methodology of research are changing. Scientists are relying on AI to come up with new and more sophisticated ways of thinking. For example, Google is partnering with NASA and feeding all the data from telescopes into an algorithm to discover new laws of physics. And NU is one of the few platforms that helps us at least understand this radical revolution,” Nurbek said.
As the Minister noted, Kazakhstan is creating educational hubs to attract talent to the region. In 2022, with the support of the state, branches of foreign universities were opened on the basis of 4 regional universities. Last year, eight more branches were opened to prepare engineering and technical specialists. The experience of autonomy and expertise of NU played a significant role in this work.
“The development of NU is one of our key priorities. NU paved the way and became a model for bringing foreign educational institutions to Kazakhstan. We are using a lot of experience that NU has accumulated working with strategic partners, and we are using this to provide these really solid universities with the maximum flexibility possible in our reality,” Sayasat Nurbek said, noting the university’s contribution to the development of the education and science system.
On Open Talk platform, the dialogue was moderated by Yerasyl Kadirzhanov, the NU Student Government leader, a 4th year undergraduate student majoring in Computer Science. During the Q&A session, students asked the Minister questions about increasing funding for higher education and science, development of the academic Kazakh language, attracting foreign students to study in Kazakhstan and many other questions. S. Nurbek noted the high achievements of the students of the university, wished them good luck in their studies and promised to meet again to maintain a dialogue between the Minister and the students.
