Your MBA professor. Is it just your teacher and mentor, or it can be your friend, comrade, and future partner? MBA 16 candidates would say “it depends!”. Our faculty team is very diverse, we have professors from India, Czech Republic, Bulgaria, United States, Russia, and other countries. Besides having established faculty team, we also have visiting professors.

The class of 2016 has a great tradition of taking out every professor at the end of the course. In other words, every two weeks, after the final is over, evaluation forms are filled, we invite the professor out. We go to bars (yes, we do!), restaurants with international cuisines, bowling, or lounges. Student-teacher relationship is always a two-way street. So we get spoiled by our professors as well. They generously order food to school, cook with their families for the whole class, invite us for drinks, and spontaneously go with us to try first ever McDonalds in Kazakhstan. Another tradition that we cherish is giving Kazakh souvenirs (astau, dombras, key chains, etc) to professors traveling from abroad. Not every business school can be proud of its student-faculty relationships. I am very happy to be part of the small NU GSB community, part of a friendly, expanding and modern network that is so new for Kazakhstan. One of the many lessons to be learned at NU MBA — invest in relationships and in people.