AKUAANA President’s Message to Alumni: January 2014

January 1^st, 2014

Dear AKU Medical College Alumni,

Thank you for installing us as the leaders of your Alumni Association for the next two years. We would also like to thank our predecessors who have guided this association as we celebrate 25 years since the first class graduated from AKU in 1988.

There are roughly 1800 AKUMC graduates in North America and they represent the fastest growing segment of all medical graduates from Pakistan. Those of you who follow our website and our Facebook page already know how successful our graduates have been in their adopted homelands. We have some of the youngest professors, most successful academicians and brightest entrepreneurs in the country!

At this juncture, your association AKUAANA has to decide what its future holds. Is it a group that loosely represents very successful physicians in North America and meets once a year at the sidelines of the APPNA summer convention? Or can we be a strong, successful organization that will help shape our collective response to this ever-changing social, political and economical landscape? How can we foster and nurture medical students and new graduates trying to achieve success in this competitive environment? Where and how, can we make our lives and the lives of our families, children and those around us better? Where and how do we give back to the nation that we call our ancestral home?

We don’t pretend to have the answers to these questions, but do believe that when you take some of the brightest minds that Pakistan has nurtured, these answers will come. They will come slowly, incrementally, in fits and starts, but they will come. To do so, we have to engage our alumni and give them a platform to bring forth their ideas and then a mechanism to give these ideas life.

Clearly, none of these goals can be accomplished without active alumni involvement. This participation has to begin with becoming an AKUAANA member and then active participation in all the decisions that we have to make over the next 25 years. We start the membership drive this month, so please join us, encourage others and get excited about the possibilities!

We thank you again for this opportunity to serve the organization and hope that we can live up to your expectations. If you have any questions, comments or thoughts, please reach out to any member of the team.

Happy New Year and best wishes,

Faisal Qureshi, 1993
President, AKUAANA (2014-15)