News & Stories

On August 22, our closely-knit HKUST EMBA alumni on the mainland and abroad celebrated the fifth edition of its Alumni Association in Guangzhou! The ecstatic occasion was also streamed live to spread the joy among thousands of alumni and faculty members globally.

Our students, like others around the world, are adapting to the impacts of a pandemic in full swing and the city on partial lockdown. With their lives turned upside down, many are feeling growing anxieties and fears about the unknown future. For final-year biotechnology major Sharon CHUNG Sze-Long, the outlook is even grimmer: the class of 2020 will graduate into the worst job market in many years because the global economy has been hit hard due to the pandemic. “Final years are typically fraught with worry and uncertainty, but what our cohort is facing is something else. The fact that I haven’t been able to see my classmates to talk things through has made it particularly frustrating,” she says. Read another related article: Silver Linings Amid Tough Job Market

To promote the scholarly legacy of Dr. Joseph NEEDHAM through a future community of “Needham Scholars”, HKUST and Joseph Needham Foundation for Science & Civilisation Hong Kong (JNFSC) join hands to launch a Merit Scholarship program to draw high-caliber students to contribute to the field of science, especially in the STEM areas, with a focus on humanity at the same time. 

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic that has turned the world economy upside-down, many graduating students are worried about their prospects in the job market this year and next. Some say this is worse than the financial crisis in 2008; and some believe Hong Kong’s economy today is worse than that in 2003, when the city was hit hard by SARS. Some even compare the current situation to the Great Depression in the 1930s. But our fellow graduates of the class of 2003, who faced similar tough job market, not only survived the hiring drought after SARS, but also thrived in their career paths, proving that there is always an opportunity that lies in every crisis.

Student Information, Announcement and Support

Dennis CHOW, a graduate of Mathematics in 2018, is a firm believer in learning by doing. And thanks to his outgoing personality and an insatiable appetite for new challenges, throughout his four years at HKUST, the young man made the most of every opportunity provided by the University to build his experiences and skills that set himself apart from his peers, and even outperformed them when they graduated.

HKUST has been committed to enrolling students from around the world to foster campus diversity and advance internationalization. To continue broadening the non-local student mix, the University introduced a “Counselor Fly-in” program in 2018 to let high school counselors from Central Asia and Middle East have a deeper understanding of what opportunities HKUST can offer to their students. The program continued in March 2019 with some 30 high school counselors from nine Western European countries joining. Here we meet two students from Kazakhstan and Turkey who share with us what brought them to Hong Kong. Fourth-year Biotechnology and Business student Kamila ABDRASSILOVA from Kazakhstan witnessed the increasing number of students from her home country – when she started, there were only seven and now the number has doubled to 14.

Video game enthusiast Wei Lili has turned her childhood interest into cutting-edge research that sets to produce reliable high-quality software for mobile phone users.