News & Stories

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.

The HKUST Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) Team defended their champion title in the 14th Hong Kong Regional of the MATE International ROV Competition. The ROV Team, a sub-team of the HKUST Robotics Team, has been named champion in this competition for the ninth consecutive year. They will represent Hong Kong to take part in the MATE International ROV Competition 2019 in Kingsport, Tennessee, US on June 20-22.

Edith Lee has experienced serious heartbreaks when she narrowly missed out on qualifying for world-class archery competitions not only once, but twice. The computer science and engineering student, who is one of the city’s top recurve bow archers, is now taking her gap year before resuming her final year study in September, after her disqualification for the World University Championships and the Asian Games. Edith studied science subjects in secondary school but she admits she was never a top student, so had never dreamed of studying in a university. But in order to follow her idol Korean archer Ki Bo Bae’s path to compete in the World University Archery Championships, she studied extremely hard and was admitted to HKUST in 2015.

Alumni Derrick Leung, Clifford Phung and Amy Poon share how they experienced the HKUST engineering spirit and are working to pass it on by building a strong and supportive network.

Little did Sandra Sobanska know when she left her native Poland in 2014 to join HKUST’s Global Business undergraduate program, that within three years she could be part of a team staging anything quite like Hack Horizon. However this unique international - and airborne – hackathon is only the latest stage in the exciting journey Sobanska says she’s been on since her arrival in Hong Kong. 

Recent news covered Chris Ko from the class of 2017 about her vegetarian tea cafe in Tsim Sha Tsui, and how she made good use of every skill she learnt from HKUST’s EVMT program to realize her dream. “When I chose to apply to the Environmental Management and Technology (EVMT) program, I thought I would be learning about a wide range of environmental issues and their solutions,” said Chris. “But what’s more, I discovered what I wanted to do, and the program helped me achieved my goals.” EVMT offers students a unique opportunity to grasp scientific and technological concepts and translate them into practice-based and sustainable business ideas. The intense, cross disciplinary program only admits 15 students every year, making it one of the most competitive degree programs in Hong Kong.

An inclusive student initiative is building bonds and understanding between the myriad individuals who comprise HKUST Be prepared to go beyond technology, timetables and tests if you talk with a member of “Humans of HKUST”. The project, established and driven by students, conducts far-reaching interviews with a diverse range of HKUST-ers, exploring the culture, background, and personal experiences of individuals across the University’s globalized community. Quotes, moving anecdotes, and thought-provoking views are then shared through Facebook and compiled into an annual book of stories, distributed free on campus.