Enthusiasm

During my recent trip to Namal College, I learnt quite a few things that I've been wanting to blog about. Some of them, I've already covered, and others I will cover in this and some future blog posts.




This post is about the excitement and enthusiasm that I saw at Namal College. The student's excitement is quite obvious. Some of them probably couldn't have continued their education, had it not been for Namal College. You see, Namal College waives all or part of the students' fees on a need basis, and focuses on remote areas where education is really lacking. Namal itself is in such a locality, making it accessible to a large section of the higher education deprived community. But I'm drifting from the point, here.
Like I said, the students are really excited. One of them was telling us that when he first came to Namal College, the other batches were on vacations and their was not much activity on campus. After his first visit, when he went home, he complained to his parents that they had sent him to a place where he feels really lonely. But when he returned from that visit, the older batches had returned. The activity on campus excited him and he no longer wants to go back home. Many undergrads at other institutions also share this sort of feelings, but I found that the level of excitement at Namal College was quite high.
But that's not all. It's not just the students at Namal College who are excited about it. The feeling is shared across the board all the through the staff, the faculty and the Board members. The senior most faculty were telling me that due to malfunction in the water supply system, the previous day they had carried buckets full of water to the dorms, and washed them with wipers themselves. I can relate to that kind of enthusiasm, because I had my first job at the Department of Computer Systems Engineering, N.E.D. University of Engineering and Technology, right after it was formed. Nothing was on the ground, just like Namal College. No processes were defined. We felt no separation between ourselves and clerical and janitorial staff members. We worked shoulder to shoulder with them, never shying away from laborious work nowhere in a faculty member's job responsibilities. Now Namal's situation is amplified over ours. They have higher bars to jump over, simply because we were in Karachi, they are at Namal and because we were part of a larger university, and their university is only as big as they are. Everyone there is ten times as enthusiastic as me and my colleagues were at the Computer Systems Engineering Department at N.E.D. You should go and see them. You'd feel the urge to share the hard work with them.

In addition to being incredibly excited, the students at Namal College are really intelligent. They area also not shy and come forward with their questions to you and you wouldn't be able to leave them without a satisfactory answer. Some people would be surprised to see that kind of openness and sharp intellect in students coming from such remote areas where primary education is, supposedly, really lacking. But, the reason Namal was envisioned was the abundant presence of such brilliant minds in the remote areas and the relative shortage of higher education facilities for them.
Namal College has progressed very rapidly. I wish them plenty of success in the future and pray that they realize their dreams.