40 YEARS LATER Stories of graduates for whom time is powerless

They stood at the main entrance to the university. Noon. The summer heat enveloped Shakarim University Square. They were in no hurry to leave, peering at the familiar walls, as if trying to see themselves here forty years ago. Today they are accomplished people. Behind us are decades of work, families, children, grandchildren, profession, experience and trials.

Graduates of the Semipalatinsk Technological Institute of Meat and Dairy Industry met again at the walls of Shakarim University, which continues the history of their native university.

A lot has changed in forty years. The university has become a modern research center. The only things that have not changed are the memory of their student years, gratitude to the teachers and respect for the person who opened the way for them to enter the profession. For many, such a Mentor was and remains Kumarbek Zhunusbekovich Amirkhanov, Doctor of Technical Sciences, Professor at Shakarim University

At our request, the meeting participants shared their memories.

Kumarbek AMIRKHANOV, Doctor of Technical Sciences

Professor Shakarim University

A real teacher never stops learning from his students

Forty years have passed. When you look at your graduates after so much time, you understand: the work of a teacher does not end with the last lecture, exam or presentation of diplomas, it continues throughout their lives in the destinies of the people whom you once taught.

I'm talking about graduates of the Semipalatinsk Technological Institute of Meat and Dairy Industry in 1986. It was here that their path to the profession once began, which forty years later again led to their native threshold!

Zhumatai Urazbaev, Doctor of Technical Sciences, Chairman of the Board of the Kazakh Research Institute of Processing and Food Industry; Serik Ualiev, Doctor of Technical Sciences, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Euroasia Transit Group LLP; Khoshken Kuanbaev, director of Shygys Munai Onimderi LLP; Bermaganbet Kozhakhaev, director of PetroKazakhstan LLP; Adil Aimakov, General Director of Avantage Oil LLP; Alexander Petrov, director of the enterprise for the production of biological wastewater treatment systems (Russia), etc.

Only a few names, but behind them are dozens of business leaders, scientists, engineers, technologists and specialists working for the economy of Kazakhstan.

Sergey Ivanov, an entrepreneur from Barnaul, works in Russia. Sergey Polyakov, engineer for air conditioning systems at a metallurgical plant in Novokuznetsk...

The university has been and remains a place that brings people together.

I would like to say special words of gratitude to those who initiated this meeting 40 years later: Kairat Smagulov, Ergali Baildinov, Aslan Dikanbaev, Khoshken Kuanbaev. Thanks to their initiative, forty years later, people who were once united by the famous institute have gathered again.

It is commonly said that a teacher teaches students, this is true, but there is another truth. Over the years, students have taught us, their teachers, a lot.

They helped to understand that the main achievement of a teacher is measured by graduates, what they have become, how they relate to the profession, country, university.

That's why, after forty years, we talk like colleagues; isn't this the highest reward for teachers? A lot has changed over the decades! And the name of the university, its buildings, laboratories, equipment, educational programs.

Shakarim University is becoming a modern research university. It is especially dear to know that I went through this entire path from the Semipalatinsk Technological Institute to the modern Shakarim University with him.

But there are things that never change: curiosity, attitude, respect for work, people and your mentor. That’s why meeting graduates forty years later touched me so much; they didn’t just come to see what the university had become. They returned home.

Very soon this same threshold will be crossed by a new generation of students who will live and work in a completely different Kazakhstan - a country of technology, digital economy, advanced processing, and global competition. And I believe that they will also one day return here in twenty, forty years, here, where their own history began. The university is alive with people. This means that the memory of the past continues to create the history of the future.