STEP – Science, Technology, and Education in Pakistan

In collaboration with IEEE-LUMS and IEEE-NUCES as part of IEEE-week, STEP has organized talks by Saad Fazil and Kellee Santiago on February 7th, 2010. The talks will be streamed live and a brief Q&A session will follow each talk. The talks will be aimed at a general... Read the rest of this entry

In an effort to enforce quality, the HEC recently announced that they would not recognize PhD degrees awarded unless the recipient manages to score a 40 percentile on the GRE subject test at the time of admission to the graduate program, reported here. This is a... Read the rest of this entry

The history of Special Education in Pakistan goes back farther than the history of Pakistan itself. With the earliest school for disabled children established in Lahore in 1906, it has now been more than a century since institutions dedicated to the education of special... Read the rest of this entry

STEP: Informed, perhaps, by your experiences as a student at MIT during the Vietnam War, you have spoken in favor of re-establishing student unions in Pakistani Universities. Could you briefly make the case for re-instituting student unions in Pakistan? PH:... Read the rest of this entry

The purpose of developing university-based research should be much broader. You cannot, or rather should not, try to build a research ecosystem just for the purpose of achieving short-term, balance-sheet like, measurable goals. Read the rest of this entry

When schools decide to operate far beyond the reaches of ordinary citizens of a country, then they also bear an awesome social responsibility. Read the rest of this entry

What benefit does research being done in Pakistani universities bring to the man on the street? As the new breed of HEC-Funded PhD Scholars joins Pakistani universities, this is a pertinent question to ask. Producing PhDs, whether within Pakistan or abroad, is a... Read the rest of this entry

“Love thy neighbor” is how the saying goes, but words don’t always reflect reality. While the intense rivalry between India and Pakistan is not new, the World Trade Center event in September 2001 and its aftermath have left Pakistan in an unfamiliar and delicate... Read the rest of this entry

What is the crucial quality important for succeeding in graduate school? I will provide a few examples that suggest that: i) The answer is not intelligence -- a minimum of intelligence, such as what everyone reading this article has, is sufficient for succeeding in any... Read the rest of this entry

There has been no dearth of commentary on the Kerry Lugar Bill. It has been hotly debated inside our parliament, on every T.V. channel in Pakistan and in every nook and corner of the country.   Much of the debate has focused on the political dimensions of the bill... Read the rest of this entry