This year is our tenth anniversary, and reflecting on our history we feel that the accomplishments were tremendous. To mention the least, we will start with students, seminars, exhibitions, forums, social media, and last but not least our magazine.
We managed to counsel over 1200 students a year, we managed to find scholarships to most of our students. Looking at the students and their whereabouts sheds light on our commitment to education around the gulf and the fulfillment of our business plan. We said from day one that we will be counseling students from the whole gulf area, and that is what we did. We work with students from Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and Oman. We also worked with the cosmopolitan population living in the Gulf, so we had Indians, Philippines, Pakistanis, British, Srilankans, South Africans, Kenyans, Yemenis, and you name it from the nationalities living in the UAE, we had worked with them. We had attended weddings of our students, seen their lovely kids, visited them in their homes, attended their relatives’ funerals as well as their illness; they touched our lives and we touched theirs. We had two of our students die prior to departure! that was really sad.
We participated in over 30 agent workshops, 200 career fairs, 70 exhibitions, had 7 own exhibitions and spoke in many school and college seminars about study abroad. We also attended many women conferences, entrepreneurial conferences, environmental conferences, quality groups, education conferences and so on. We were so active that we had few TV interviews by CNN, BBC, and Eqtisadia. We also participated in interviews on education, replied to surveys for various subjects on education, participated in PHD studies, were the subject of PHD studies for 5 students, and wrote many articles for newspapers and magazines. We have our own blog on education and participate in other people blogs about the same field. Basically over the past ten years we spent over 16 hours a day dealing in the same subject, and hoping to affect people’s lives the same way education affected our lives.
We became members of many groups and forums, and we had extensively used social media to enlighten students’ lives. Our students follow us on twitter, and also like our page on facebook, but are personal friends on the director’s facebook. We share with them our happiness and our disgust. We talk to them about their trouble, and wish them well on their birthdays, they comment on our pictures and are our strongest advocates when some of their relatives want to have a similar experience as they did.
Over the years we published a magazine per year, and printed 10000 copies of which. These copies where distributed to students and members of the public alike. We are now preparing for ‘World of Education™ – Volume Two’! The main focus of this version will be art, science, technology, engineering and mathematics, as we in the gulf region are emphasizing these few subjects in schools in our many education reforms strategies.
A section of the book will be a tribute to Christchurch, to pay our respects to the students as well as the manager (Brian Taylor) of Kings School who died during the major earthquake that hit Christchurch in February 2011. Funds will be raised from the sale of the “Love Christchurch” badge, which is sold in the Education Zone office.
We would love for you to be with us to celebrate education, to enlighten our students as well as their parents.
On an empathetic side, we established a charity organization called “kill poverty by education” that is working so hard to find funds for the deprived ones. Our mission statement is almost complete and we are ready to tackle the next decade with more achievements.
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