A group of best performing high school students with a grade point average 10 were awarded Golden Medals by the Prime Minister Edi Rama in person during a special ceremony at the Maps Hall at the Prime Minister’s office on Thursday.
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Welcome! For the sake of truth, this hall has never been so crowded and cramped with so many wise young people!
Four excellent minds in every square meter. This can’t be accomplished in any other way than with you. Therefore, I would like to thank and express respect for your accomplishment.
I am convinced that as you are presented with these medals today, you tend to forget your hard work, difficult moments and fatigue, but I am also convinced that as you receive the medals today, when you return home try to remember because now that by performing excellently and achieving your targets, you should never forget that that result is the fruit of an extraordinary effort.
Why not to forget? You should not forget and properly appreciate not only your performance, but everyone around you that has played an important role in your efforts to perform best and achieve such results.
You and others like you are one of the biggest, most important, most memorable reasons for me to keep doing this job and do all I can to make things work best possible.
We have decided to completely change the support scheme for the best performing students, and I don’t mean the ones with the grade point average 9 and 10. We have named them excellent students for ease of communication, but if students with grade point average 9 are excellent, you here with the grade point average 10 should be “aliens. I am not talking about UFOs.
You all know that an early programme has been approved by the Albanian government for so many years now. It is definitely a programme with good intentions and we maintained that by providing state budget funds to support the best Albanian students attending some of the best international universities all over the world. The government has provided funding for at least 20 students each year. However, none of them has been so kind as to somehow pay back this investment to the country.
We will certainly focus our attention on the medicine students and we will support 20 best performing students each year, and under the system we have already picked we will provide funding for 200 to 400 students, depending on their performance and we will allocate a monthly salary to each of them. However, any of these students to be included in this system won’t be handed over the university diploma upon completing university. This means that a medicine-graduated student should work for three years as a doctor in the country and only then he or she will be provided the university diploma and they will then be free to decide whether to work in the country or abroad.
Not only that, but we are working to make the system work for the priority subjects, as well for others because we cannot go on this way.
I think that the university is changing and I am very glad that the number of students who have decided to study here this year is higher than in the past, 87% of the best performing students have decided to study in Albania and I would like to assure you of your right choice. It is not that our universities offer the same quality teaching as quality universities in various countries in Europe, but because if you are to take notice of the situation in different European countries, in the context of today’s crisis and very serious problems, not all universities, but fewer universities are now offering what they seemingly offer.
That being said, you have made your best choice, because the University is changing and this is not because I want it to happen, but because there are some facts that are starting to show the change and one of the facts is the very significant increase in the number of accords already signed with foreign university on joint and various degree programs, on quality exchanges and 41 more agreements are underway with leading universities.
A novelty introduced to our universities is the English language degree programs that the university graduates didn’t have the chance to attend three, four or five years ago. The number of English curricula at Tirana University is currently 22. No such university curricula were available just a few years ago, but their number is now steadily increasing as they proved to be successful and 22 degree programs are now introduced to Tirana University alone.
We have also introduced sports and coding programs for all the parts that deal with technology, bio-technology and so on that can be a complementary direction, very important for the future and nowadays.
