NUST and the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to launch Graduate Record Examination preparatory workshops under the Talent Farming component of Phase I of the United States-Pakistan Knowledge Corridor initiative. The agreement was signed by HEC Chairman Prof. Dr. Niaz Ahmad Akhtar and NUST Pro-Rector Academics Dr. Osman Hasan, marking a significant development in Pakistan’s higher education landscape and its ambitions to increase the presence of Pakistani graduates in leading academic institutions worldwide.
The workshops will be delivered through NUST’s Iqbal Executive Development Centre, which has an established track record in professional and executive education, and will be structured to prepare students for the Graduate Record Examination, a standardized test widely required for admission to graduate programmes at universities across the United States and other English-speaking countries. For Pakistani graduates, performance on the Graduate Record Examination has historically been a critical determinant of access to fully funded scholarships and competitive graduate programmes abroad, making quality preparatory support a meaningful intervention in expanding real academic mobility rather than simply aspirational policy.
The United States-Pakistan Knowledge Corridor, under which this initiative falls, is a bilateral programme designed to send Pakistani doctoral and postdoctoral scholars to American universities for advanced training, with the expectation that they return and contribute to Pakistan’s higher education and research ecosystem. The Talent Farming component specifically focuses on building the pipeline of candidates who are academically competitive enough to enter and succeed in top-tier graduate programmes, addressing a foundational bottleneck that has limited the number of Pakistanis who can meaningfully benefit from such exchange opportunities. By embedding Graduate Record Examination preparation within a structured institutional framework under HEC and NUST, the initiative moves beyond ad hoc coaching arrangements toward a scalable, credentialed pathway that can reach students across the country and systematically strengthen Pakistan’s representation in global academic spaces.
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