Education and careers: Three-day expo begins

LAHORE: With files full of marketing literature and notebooks to note down additional information, aspiring higher education students roamed the main hall of the International Expo Centre, Johar Town, at the Education Expo and Book Fair on Friday.

The Education Expo is held every year. Various educational institutions and related businesses set up stalls to attract prospective students.

The Centre’s hall has served as a platform for more than 110 educational institutions, student counselling and immigration agents and a few publishing houses.

Booths of immigration agencies who claim to be ‘experts’ in getting visas for students can be seen after every three to four stalls. However, most of the small trickle of students on Friday was headed towards stalls of local colleges and universities. Sufian, who recently completed his A-Levels from the Beaconhouse School System, said that he had applied twice to a university in the UK, but failed both times to acquire a visa.

“Due to the international controversies about Pakistan, it’s getting harder for us to get visas,” he said. Sufian now plans to apply to a local university for a business degree.

While some of the major institutions including Lahore University of Management Sciences, University College Lahore, Kinnaird College for Women University and Lahore College for Women University were missing, some new institutions were conspicuous. Among the recently opened institutions that had booths set up are School of Innovative Learning and Knowledge and the ATS Training Institute, claiming to be the first ever institute of aerospace and avionics studies in Pakistan certified by the European Aviation Safety Agency. Nighat Afzal, a coordinator at the stall of a newly established college in Lahore, said that such events not only gave schools an opportunity to market themselves and interact with the students, but also helped the students in making an ‘informed’ choice.

The Pakistan Gems and Jewellery Development Company, a project of the Ministry of Industries and Production, attracted a lot of interest because the short courses offered in jewellery making and designing are entirely free of charge. The work of former students was also displayed at the stall. A large poster also bragged about a student, Rehan Sheikh, who won the Matrix Design Contest 2010 in the USA. Sheikh had designed a spiral pendant, inspired by a cyclone.

A Book Fair is also part of the expo. There are English novels, encyclopaedias and reference books, travelogues and general knowledge books and Urdu books for children aplenty.

Sidra Khan, the event coordinator and the executive secretary to the chief executive officer of the Expo Centre, said, “Since most universities issue calls for applications in summer, we thought this was the best time for us to tell the students what choices they have.” Khan hoped that the expo would be seeing more visitors over the weekend.

The three-day event will conclude on Sunday.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 5^th, 2011.