As you click your way through the fact-filled tabs on AUBG’s website, you will find answers to the many questions you have about our unique and exceptional university.
But before you start through all of that information, I’d like to use my president’s message to set the stage for you to appreciate why the faculty, the students, the alumni, the donors, the staff and the administrators like me, all feel so dedicated to this very special institution.
In 1991, AUBG greeted, tested, registered, and began teaching its first students in a prominent building in the heart of downtown Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria. The office and classroom furnishings and even the couches in the hallways were either left over from the building’s former occupants or passed on from a closing military base. Those furnishings provided work and conferencing space for the students, the faculty and the staff as the dream of an American-style liberal arts university in Bulgaria began to come alive. But far more important than the furnishings, was the collected energy and enthusiasm to create a university that would then and in the future offer students uncommon opportunities in this part of the world:
- The opportunity to get a modern, increasingly high-tech American-style education in an Eastern European setting.
- The opportunity to participate in the rigorous give-and-take of academic classes taught in English by western educated professors.
- The opportunity to learn the lessons of living with others in multi-national residence halls.
- The opportunity to establish and take part in a multitude of creative, athletic, and community service activities.
- The opportunity to qualify for student scholarship funds offered by generous alumni, friends, corporate and foundation donors.
- The opportunity to engage in global internships, work-travel programs, and post-graduate studies.
Today, AUBG continues to be headquartered in that same centrally located structure in the center of Blagoevgrad with some of those same sturdy tables still in the offices and the comfortable couches in the hallways.
But it’s the pictures on the walls now that tell the stories of the women and men who for the past twenty years have accepted the AUBG invitation to come and work, study, teach, and grow in a place that challenges them like no other and opens doors to opportunities that they could scarcely have imagined. All of that activity continues now both at our original campus location, and at the new part of the campus with its modern residence halls, academic buildings, theater and student center.
Whatever your interest is in AUBG...prospective or current student, parent, graduate, donor, or friend... I hope that you now have a fuller sense of what someone once called “that gem in the Balkans”. I invite you to continue your quest both online and in person to get to know us and to come and see AUBG for yourself and feel the energy that thrives here.