Pakistan’s first recipient of a prestigious University of Oxford scholarship has credited the UAE education system for his life-changing achievement.
Farzan Ahmad Khan is the first UAE-based winner of the Oxford-Pershing Square Graduate Scholarship and will head to England to study in October.
His UAE journey started when New York University Abu Dhabi's vision of a global liberal arts curriculum brought him to the country in 2014.
Change of scenery
Mr Khan grew up in Lahore, Pakistan, learning in classrooms with as many as 250 pupils. His high school was competitive and the top-down structure was rigid.
In Abu Dhabi, he found a different system – in which he could study engineering alongside liberal arts and make an impact on the institution as a student.
"NYUAD was a major change for me in how much agency students can have in the shared governance piece of an institution," he told The National.
"When I came here, all of a sudden faculty is someone that you can have a great conversation with, someone who can be vulnerable with you."
His university time was transformational and he sees the experience as the catalyst for his passion for higher education. He now works at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) as a student-engagement specialist.
As a postgraduate, he wants to make a difference to students' lives.
"I felt that there was growth happening constantly. I was reflecting on my own values," he said. "I don't think I was any more talented than thousands of other students who could have taken my spot in that class. So, for me it was that reflection – it was seriously impactful for me and has set me up on a certain trajectory in life.
"There was a thought process of how can I be involved in other people's impactful journeys as well, even if I can make a minor difference."
Making a difference back home
After graduating, Mr Khan hopes to take what he has learnt during his time at NYUAD and MBZUAI and apply it to his home country, where he sees plenty of potential but a lack of expertise.
"I've seen what the UAE has been able to do in a very short period of time in such an impressive way with higher education" he said. "It has almost gotten to the point where they're parallel with the really old institutions in the US and the UK."
At MBZUAI, he was part of the team building the structure of student affairs for the first undergraduate class, which he found rewarding. Now he is ready to take these lessons to the next level.
"It's exciting to think what we can take away from there and apply to a place like Pakistan... identify where resources might be wasted, where more scholarship pathways can be opened," he said.
AI and education
The two-year fully funded programme will offer Mr Khan two degrees – a master of Science in Education and an MBA. In his first year, Mr Khan is interested in measuring the impact of AI on the education sector.
"I would really love to understand how research, within the education space, can become a little bit more nimble to reflect the pace of development that's happening, and then to go into the MBA thinking about how can we use AI to solve some of the financial stressors that might be present in this field," he said.
