Tia Kaisheva and Reneta Georgieva Win Rising Impactors Scholarship 2020
Tia Kaisheva and Reneta Georgieva from Stara Zagora together won this year's AUBG Rising Impactors Scholarship, an initiative that aims to support young change-makers in receiving a high-quality education. Fifteen high school students from across Bulgaria competed for the scholarship, and what helped Kaisheva and Georgieva win was a project that helps students discover that science can be fun through games, presentations and quizzes.
"YourScience is a project which started really quickly and reached unexpected success," Kaisheva said. "Reneta and I love science and have always dug into the unknown world of mysteries [that it offers.]"
The two students went to four schools and taught mathematics, biology and astronomy to 400 students aged 10 to 16. "We established YourScience to help students from different age groups become more interested in the sciences," Georgieva said. "Nowadays, there are not enough science lessons in Bulgarian schools that focus not only on theory but also on practice. Thus, students often face difficulty in understanding the curriculum and end up thinking that science is rather boring. Having realized this, Tia and I decided to make a change for the better and contribute to society. (...) We managed to boost the students' curiosity for science, encourage their creativity and help them learn how to work in teams."
Both students are now taking part in a two-year-long family-oriented Erasmus+ project incorporating YourScience into people's homes. The two girls have also invited younger student Iva Stefanova on their team to continue the project in schools after they go to university.
Kaisheva and Georgieva, who are passionate about science but also love doing arts and sports, look forward to starting their AUBG education this fall. "I love how many extracurricular activities" are there at the university, Kaisheva said. "I will definitely try as much as possible."
Established in 2019, the Rising Impactors Program provides socially conscious Bulgarian students with scholarships to study at AUBG. The program will cover 50% of Kaisheva and Georgieva's university tuitions for their four years of study. Several companies have donated to the initiative in the past two years, as well as many AUBG friends and supporters, alumni, faculty and staff members.
"Firstly, I chose to study at AUBG because I wanted to study in my home country – Bulgaria," Georgieva said. "And AUBG is the only university in the country that offers prestigious liberal arts education and allows students to experiment, meet people from different countries and enjoy various extracurricular activities."
"I am very excited that in September, I am going be a freshman at AUBG," Kaisheva said. "I am looking forward to learning new things, joining many clubs and meeting new people. I am thrilled [to enter] a new world of opportunities and be independent and live far from home for the first time in my life. Maybe getting used to adulthood will be the most challenging thing for me at the beginning."