Not long after the Commencement of Class 2012 some recent graduates have already joined the workforce and started their quest to professional excellence. We randomly contacted four already employed AUBG alumni of this year’s class to find out what their first impressions of their new jobs are.

Anna Ceachirova during her personal presentation at Mindvalley.

Anna Ceachirova majored in BUS and JMC, and is now in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, working on a one year contract with Mindvalley – a company that connects authors with the internet generation.

She found this job through the AIESEC network and it can be considered as an AIESEC internship. “However, it is not necessary to apply through AIESEC, I just got to know about the company through the organization. One of the cool things about Mindvalley is that they require a video cover letter. I have submitted my video cover letter and my CV and went through three interviews,” she said. Continue reading…

Usual reception food at AUBG.

If you are one of the few that haven’t heard yet, Mark Waterhouse, owner of the fine dining restaurant Casa Adria, is the new Executive Chef in charge of the Dining Services at AUBG. It seems to us, the Daily staff, that the guy will be around for some time. He has already established some presence by making a group on Facebook (link at the bottom of the article) where he actively communicates with the student body and carefully notes all comments and feedback. The following interview sheds some light on the upcoming changes under his “rule”.
Tell us more about what you did before coming to Bulgaria and what made you come here? Why Blagoevgrad?

I have lived outside the UK for 22 years and before coming to Blagoevgrad spent 20 years in Portugal, working for 4/5 star hotel groups in the marketing departments. My background is in hotels and catering and I have a diploma in hotel and catering management. Continue reading…

Elieff Center in Sofia will host the new program. Source: aubg.bg

AUBG will offer a new Master of Science in Software Engineering from the beginning of next semester, Fall 2012, hosted in the Elieff Center in Sofia. The duration of the new program will be 4 semesters (16 months) with its first class graduating in May 2014. The last fourth semester will be reserved for a Master Thesis only.

The admission process is already in place and more information about the application requirements can be found on the University’s website. The tuition fee for the new program is 10,000 Euro for the first year and the Faculty consists of the well-known professors from the Bachelor of Arts major in Computer Science plus some new faces, such as Boyan Bontchev, Sylvia Ilieva and Roumen Nikolov (Associate Professors, Sofia University), Avram Eskenazi (Bulgarian Academy of Science) and Miroslav Iliev (CEO, Rila Solutions).

The new program will be officially announced on June 27 at the Elieff Center by Prof. John Galletly and Board of Trustees member and Co-founder of Neveq, Pavel Ezekiev. The event starts at 18:30.

For more information on the Master of Science in Software Engineering visit its page on AUBG Sofia’s website.

Sources: aubg.bg; computerworld.bg

With the Commencement for the Class of 2012 on May 13, 2012, the 21st Academic Year in the history of AUBG was officially brought to a conclusion. The class was made up of 238 undergraduates and 24 graduates, who received their B.A. (Bachelor of Arts) and MBA (Master of Business Administration) diplomas.

Elena Fominykh, Valedictorian. Courtesy of e-79.com.

The ceremony was attended by around 2000 people — students, alumni, Faculty and Board members, honorary guests, parents, relatives, friends.

The Valedictorian and the Salutatorian of the class were announced during the ceremony. Vadzim Marasanau from Belarus, who majored in Business Administration and Economics, had the second highest GPA in the class — 3.98. Valedictorian, with a GPA of 3.99, became Elena Fominykh from Russia, who also majored in Business and Economics. Continue reading…

The first semester in the life of the newest medium on campus, the Daily, is over. It wasn’t even a full semester. It has not even been a full three months after we launched the website on Feb. 20, 2012, with this allstud email that everyone received with a 12-hour delay at around noon. Only an hour later the server went down… It was not going to be an easy start, but we were prepared for that. A week later we figured out how to fix this sporadic server error and it hasn’t occurred since.

Many people were skeptical about a daily media at AUBG at first. They said it’s too much work and that we wouldn’t be able to keep it going for too long. It is a small university, some said. There won’t be news every day, others said. (The latter actually disturbed us, as well, but we soon realized that there is so much happening on our campus that we can hardly cover half of it.) Even the Student Government didn’t want to give us funding for an entire year in the beginning, but then, I guess, we passed the trial period. Continue reading…

Courtesy of Stoil Stoilov.

FoodHub, an online food ordering service for AUBGers, and FRAG, a gaming club unlike any other in Bulgaria, were the business ideas that won the competition of the Entrepreneurship course this semester. The closing event of the course, a public presentation of the students’ business plans, was held on Tuesday, April 24, in the Andrey Delchev Auditorium.

Six teams were competing for the $200 award provided by Junior Achievement Bulgaria and Citibank. The jury that evaluated the practicability and profitability of the ideas consisted of Stephen Feldstein (Citibank Country Officer for Bulgaria), Milena Stoicheva (President of Junior Achievement Bulgaria and the first Dean of Students at AUBG), and Dilian Pavlov (AUBG alumnus and serial entrepreneur). Moderators of the event were Prof. Andonova and Provost Reed – the pioneers of the idea for a course in entrepreneurship, sponsored by outside companies. Continue reading…