We’ve all been offered hypothetical situations to reflect on at some point; some quaint, sometimes humorous, others that make us rummage around our own reality and face who we really are.
What would you do ifs…? are among the most common, although the least imaginative are often rounded off with depressing scenarios about having a day, or a week, to live, etc.
I would spend it in a fit of total depression, would have to be my honest response, although I would probably try to say that I would go out on my bike and break all my personal records. Of course, I would watch the darts if there were some major event going on at the time. Just can’t beat it!
So, introducing another hypothetical brain-teaser, albeit one posing a rather more mellow and encouraging question:
What would you do if you had just five minutes to show somebody how good Kazakhstan is?
Well, you could do a lot worse than introduce them to Laura Vaigorova, an entrepreneur and education expert who certainly practises what she preaches with a string of qualifications and fluency in seven languages, and a CV which probably crashes the server any time she applies for a job. If she needed to, that is.
Another poser… can I write this feature in 1,500 words? I can but try.
30-year-old Laura made the news recently when she was chosen from several hundred applicants across Asia, as the only Kazakhstani representative to enter a Young Leaders programme in the USA created by Donald Rumsfeld, which prepares delegates for positions of responsibility in their own countries.
Interested parties are selected from either the public or the private sector, and Laura explained that this year she was chosen after success in her own educational enterprise and working closely with the government on various projects.
The course offers options for study towards a Master’s degree, but many of the delegates from Central Asia, the Caucasus region, and Afghanistan are not taking this option; rather, they have been enlisted on the non-study side of the programme, which centres around cultural and experience exchange.
Known as the CAMCA Fellowship, the course leaders select a candidate from each applicable country and invite them to do the five-week course, during which time each gets to interact with White House staff and representatives from the Fortune 500 list of companies.
In British English, this might be known as hobnobbing with the great and good, but to remove the irony and do the initiative more justice, the shoulder rubbing is far more than glorified networking, and Laura expects to return to Kazakhstan with another page on that CV above. That is, if there is enough toner left in the printer.
She articulated her excitement in C2+ level English.
“It’s like an experience exchange, so we will have different tours and do various workshops. And I think for about five or six days we’re going to stay in a host family. “
I’m going to Utah myself, I think to Salt Lake City, although it hasn’t been totally finalised yet. And then I’m staying with another family in Reno, in Nevada.
“The reason I applied for the programme is to expand my network because I know a few alumni of the fellowship and all of them are like great entrepreneurs or great leaders, like managers who work in corporations or for the government. So I thought, why not?
“Maybe it could also help us expand faster across Central Asia, because we have clientele from each of those countries, and also maybe strengthen our partnerships with U.S. organisations and universities.”
So what about your personal expectations? I asked.
“I’m pretty sure that those kinds of programmes where you get to spend more than a month with a certain group of people mean we can bond and share experiences, and that way we can build really long-lasting relationships that can benefit all parties. So this is what I’m looking forward to the most.”
When not hobnobbing with the great and good, Laura runs her own educational company whose remit encompasses a broad study-related suite of services, and which also includes preparing local students for higher education. Her busy period is summer, ironically, when very few people are actively studying, because this is when preparations for the new academic year are in full swing. Agreeing contracts with schools and universities aplenty make the warmer months also the busy ones for this polyglot from Eastern Kazakhstan.
“Currently, I run an edtech company called Smartest Prep. You can just call it STP. I’m the co-founder and CEO.
“It’s an edtech company that helps students prepare for international exams and apply to universities in Kazakhstan and abroad.
“So what we’re building includes both B2C and B2B SaaS solutions, where students can prep for all steps of their application process. They can train to write essays. They can prep for the SAT and all different international exams. They can build their college lists, build their career path, you know, choose majors and other things.
“For example, we have this AI SAT trainer tool, which helps you to prepare for the SAT, but it uses a lot of personalised learning. For example, if you know certain topics well and you are not familiar with others, it will focus on your weaknesses and help you improve. So, it’s like an all-in-one solution for university admissions.
“We also have partnerships with more than 350 universities now, both in Kazakhstan and overseas. And with some of them, we work on a revenue-share basis, and with others, they basically use us as a marketing tool because we post them on our platform.”
Her own background is quite a mosaic, an upbringing by different family members which included contact with different languages (although she mainly only spoke Russian as a child), in a small town (actually classed as a village in Kazakhstani terms) not too far from the city of Oskemen.
While her very early schooling was unremarkable, although not in an unflattering way, she did watch a lot of English-language cartoons in her childhood, which I, as a teacher, would urge parents to consider for their own kids, as it’s not only Laura who ended up with fluent English after laying the early foundations in this way.
She is also especially grateful to her grandmother, who taught her to read and write probably before most kids had even been introduced to books.
“I also then went to a local language centre called American Corner, and it brought me on so much that I ended up being selected for various Olympiads in English.
“I was lucky with my school and my teachers, not to mention the help I had from my grandmother, but I am increasingly impressed with education in my country; standards are improving all the time, and students from here often excel in international study thanks to their background.
“Perhaps I would like to see the culture become more accepting of mistakes. We have to start seeing errors as a natural and normal part of learning, instead of as evidence of some kind of problem.”
The forthcoming stay in the USA won’t be her first trip there. Several spells living in America have been more than holidays, although she has spent time travelling for pleasure combined with, for example, going to different conferences, including one when her company was selected by Global Silicon Valley Ventures, GSV. It is the biggest edtech venture fund in the world with financial commitments to companies like Masterclass, Coursera, and ClassDojo; many of the big names.
“GSV hosts this huge edtech conference in San Diego called ASU GSV Summit, for which we were selected as part of the ASU GSV Elite 200, basically one of the 200 fastest-growing edtech start-ups, that is, early-stage start-ups. So we took part in that.
“Although we had to skip 2022, we returned in each of 2023 and 2024 and did different start-up acceleration programs. The 2023 one was at Draper University in San Mateo, California. Tim Draper is a very famous businessman, a billionaire, like super famous and influential. He’s based in California and runs different venture funds, different companies, and has this acceleration programme for start-ups.
“In 2024, we got selected to do a programme at Stanford called Stanford Start-ups. It’s also an acceleration program for businesses and start-ups, and we’ve grown rapidly since then.”
Yes, all along with that CV, Laura.
