An entrepreneur from Swansea has become the first person from Wales to be awarded the prestigious Knight-Hennessy Scholars (KHS) scholarship at Stanford University in California.
Liam Rahman, 29, has been selected as one of 70 out of 8,000 global applicants for the largest fully-endowed graduate scholarships in the world worth $350,000 (£295,683) per recipient.
He will pursue an MBA and MA in Education from this September and participate in the KHS leadership programme at Stanford, which is designed to develop the skills of the world's future leaders.
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Mr Rahman said: "I couldn’t believe it when I got the call to say that I had been accepted onto the KHS programme. It was such a surreal experience receiving the news with a call from John Hennessy – the former President of Stanford University and current Chairman of Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company - while I was walking my dog on the beach in Swansea.”
Mr Rahman began his entrepreneurial journey at the age of 17 after co-founding Equal Education Partners - an education recruitment services company - with his mother.
After setting up the company, he went onto complete an undergraduate degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) at Yale-NUS in Singapore and Yale University in America. He has also worked in the financial services industry at BW Group and Goldman Sachs.
He returned to Wales in 2017 as the full-time managing director of Equal Education Partners, which has since grown five-fold, now employing over 130 people across Wales.
Mr Rahman also works closely with the Welsh Government initiative Seren which supports year 8 to 13 students from state schools and further education colleges in Wales to apply to top universities.
As part of his work with Seren, he has helped build international education partnerships with leading US universities including MIT and Yale. In 2018, he established the MIT Global Teaching Labs in Wales programme which brings STEM experts from MIT into Welsh classrooms in schools and colleges.
He also collaborated with the University of Oxford to set up an online summer school for Seren learners.
After completing the programme, Mr Rahman hopes to bring back the skills he has developed to support young people in Wales to aim high academically, including those on the Welsh Government’s Seren programme.
Mr Rahman aims to continue working on challenges facing the education sector, such as talent attraction and development, and hopes to forge further global partnerships and connections to enhance Wales’ education system.
He plans to do this by working on widening higher education access with Seren, improving STEM education, increasing international mobility of Welsh learners and educators, and exploring edtech solutions in the heart of Silicon Valley.
As someone who’s gay, epileptic and from a multiethnic background, he is also keen to work on initiatives to make classrooms more inclusive including those from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic backgrounds, LGBTQ+, physically impaired and neurodivergent learners.
As a Welsh speaker, he is also keen to support initiatives to help promote the language and as part of his assessment for the Knight Hennessy Scholarship, submitted a video about the Welsh language, its history, resurgence and the efforts to grow its use.
Mr Rahman said: “I am really passionate about helping young people in Wales achieve their goals and firmly believe someone’s background shouldn’t determine their future or prevent them from achieving big things.
“It’s always worth being ambitious, trying your best and aiming high, even if you don’t think it will work out. That’s why I feel strongly that Seren is so important and why I have been involved with the programme, both personally and through Equal Education Partners.”
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