Kuni Tyessi in Abuja
Abuja’s latest university, the Cosmopolitan University, is set to kick-start academic activities from September with 16 programmes under three faculties.
Cosmopolitan University is one of the 37 newly approved private universities by former President Muhammadu Buhari on May 17.
The Vice-Chancellor of the school, Prof. Carl Adams, disclosed this at the university’s Open House in Abuja, yesterday.
Adams said the university would focus on entrepreneurship and innovation and to encourage partnerships between businesses, professions, innovators and other academic organisations.
He also said students would be trained to be academic, business, industry and thought leaders of the future.
“We want this to be the best place for students; everything we do here is top quality learning activity and we want this to be in place anywhere.
“In education, we want to gain international footprint, international expertise, looking at the best in the world. So the idea is that, why send somebody to London, Berlin or New York to get an international good quality experience, where we can have it here?
“And we want to keep those students here to develop them. We want our students to be the thought leaders, not just in Nigeria but in the world.
“We are making our students at the forefront of technological thinking not as just looking at technology, but engage with them so they are able to understand, analyse, evaluate the technology and apply it to real world problems,” he said.
He said the university would collaborate with local and foreign businesses to grow students’ potential in Artificial Intelligence (AI) in research and businesses.
When asked how the university sought for its academic staff, the vice chancellor said the university would choose the best lecturers both local and international from pools of application received through advertisement.
“We are bringing in staff who are again at a variety of levels. We want motivated staff, good staff that can really take forward that learning experience for the students.
“We want staff who are expertise and very knowledgeable in their professional area. Those pushing the boundaries with research, professional practice, so we give them space to develop,” he added.
Also, the University Registrar, Dr. Mani Ibrahim, assured students of their safety through proper surveillance systems around the school.
Ibrahim said this was to check and monitor students’ activities so as to curb moral decadence in the society.
“We are in the process of developing our drug policy which will allow every student coming into the university to go through drug screening.
“We are going to work with parents and the community to carry out this so that we can ensure a free drug society,” he said.
The programmes to be run by the university include: Accounting, Business Administration, Economics, Entrepreneurship, International Relations and Criminology and Security Studies. Others are Health Information Systems, Nursing Science, Public Health, Computer Science, Cybersecurity, Information Systems and Software Engineering.
In the list of the programmes are also Computer Engineering, Electrical and Electronics Engineering and Telecommunications Engineering.
