I attended a truly interesting talk this afternoon at the iCentre conducted by Tom Kosnik, a Consulting Professor from Stanford’s Management Science and Engineering. Tom spoke about Silicon Valley and the lessons which can be learnt for high tech startups in Brunei. An interesting idea Tom put out was the idea of transforming Brunei into a “Silicon Valley” for this region. Its not that difficult to do. Just needs a lot of political will and hard work.
Oh, Tom was pleasantly surprised to learn that one of our very own is actually at Stanford now pursuing her own academic goals! He was kind enough to ask me to convey to Charlene to get in touch with him so he could introduce her to some of the entrepreneurial academics in her department. Anyway, we’ll leave some of the more juicy parts of my brief conversation with Tom for another day. For now, here are the pics.
Hey bro, I was curious when u mentioned Tom Kosnik and Stanford yesterday masa the american alumni talk so I did a search and ended up here! Amazing eh Charlene Bong ah! Not to take anything away from her bro, but is that all we are capable of? ONE Bruneian at Stanford? Nada lagi kah orang kitani yang pernah belajar disana? ataupun bercita2 utk blajar sana?
Mandrake, Allow me my two cents worth. When one talks about the best undergraduate education in the USA it often means getting into the so called HYPMS – Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT and Stanford. The first three are part of the so-called Ivy League (made up of eight universities on the East Coast). MIT is near Harvard and Stanford is on the West coast. Competition to enter the HYPMS are clearly the most difficult and competitive in the world. Statistically, they are far more difficult to get into than say the Oxbridge (Oxford and Cambridge in the UK). I am not saying they are necessarily better than Oxbridge but definitely far far far more difficult to get in. It is indeed a fantastic achievement for Brunei to have even just one student represented at such a prestigious university. Not many people here in Brunei knows about the HYPMS so I applaud you for being one of the very few to realize the significance of getting into one of these great universities. Here is a link to an NBC report from last year and I hope more Bruneians will listen to it carefully and take note. Perhaps it will spur them to make it their goal to get into the HYPMS one day.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwpGcfAV9fQ
Good luck to all prospective Bruneian undergraduate applicants to HYPMS. Who will be No. 2? That will be another fantastic day for Brunei.