My name is Adem. I used to be an unremarkable Kazakh who studied in a local school in Almaty, who, with tiny knowledge of English, and even smaller knowledge about university admissions, one day made a decision that to study abroad. As most of other Kazakhstani and Central Asian high-schoolers, I had to go through a shock therapy of having to learn everything about international university admissions from scratch and having to take tests and write essays all in a matter of months or even weeks. 5 years since, I have graduated as the top student in my major from National University of Singapore, got admitted into Master’s and fully-funded PhD programs at some of the world’s best universities, and am currently completing Master’s at Carnegie Mellon University in the US while doing research at Stanford. In this short intro I would like to introduce my website and tell you why you should even care about it. 

The website consists of two parts: a crash course and a blog. A crash course is a place where I share everything I that learned about university admissions and how to succeed in them. The crash course is uniquely designed for students from Kazakhstan and Central Asia, and includes both general information and information applicable specifically to Central Asian students in order to take advantage of our unique background and skills and to maximize our potential. It also includes some “insider” information that very few people (at least in Central Asia) are familiar with. Personally being a Kazakh who has gone through this journey (twice), and after working as a mentor for many future students and researchers in Kazakhstan,  I have realized that there is a significant lack of educational and mentoring resources for people like us that are free, accessible, helpful, up-to-date, and are designed specifically for someone from Central Asia. Although there are some educational courses about university admissions in Kazakhstan and Central Asia, most of the good quality courses are not free and not readily and easily accessible in an online format. In this free-for-everyone and accessible course, you will be able to find not only everything that I have learned in the past 6 years about university admissions, but also very honest and relatively unknown tips, tricks, and advises that very few courses teach, designed specifically for someone from Central Asia. I have a track record of mentees getting accepted to top universities, such as Harvard, and the information that I share in the crash course is the information that helped my mentees achieve their success.

Second part of the website is a blog. The overarching themes of the blog are education, technology, and environment, and the blog posts are written from a Central Asian perspective. The target audience of the blog are both people from within Central Asia and from abroad, and the aim of the blog is to connect Central Asia with the global audience by posting high-quality facts-and-science-based articles and posts on various topics, issues, and developments in Central Asia, and by sharing Central Asian perspective on global news and developments. The inspiration for this blog was a video called “World’s Most Underrated Region! (CENTRAL ASIA)” by a popular travel youtuber Drew Binsky. The reason for the region being underrated is simple – we currently have very popular English-language content makers that make high-quality and interesting content about Central Asia. So, the rationale behind my blog is to attempt to fill this gap and to help global audience learn about Central Asia on the topics of education, technology, and environment. Another problem that lack of good English-language content makers from Central Asia brings is that many issues (both within and outside of Central Asia) are not covered from our unique perspective, so this blog is an attempt to do exactly that and to offer our collective opinion to the global audience. Currently I am the sole contributor to the blog and have to rely on my own expertise and efforts to create high-quality blog posts. Therefore, cooperation from anyone and in any shape or form (especially from English-speaking Central Asian students)  is welcome!