COJO and KazNU: A Culture of Collaboration

International partnerships between universities are not only formal agreements but dedicated collaborations. An example of such partnering comes from Cindy Price Schultz and Karlyga Myssayeva, whose commitment to transcontinental academic exchange has fostered both friendship and a culture of collaboration between the University of Wyoming and Kazakhstan.

The roots of this partnership trace back to 2012 when an initial cooperation agreement was established between UW and al-Farabi Kazakhstan National University (KazNU) by Professor Emeritus Mike Brown. Cindy and Karlyga have continued Mike’s vision, ensuring this partnership is not a formality but a platform for cross-cultural learning and scholarly engagement.

After Karlyga presented recently to the COJO Department, she and Cindy discussed the successes of their collaboration, as well as their vision for its future:

Karlyga: “[It] started from the agreement of cooperation between our universities. There were three good opportunities for our [KazNU] students. The first was the summer internship…Mike, at that time, was in the charge of graduation study, and he invited our students. So, it started from that, and it's still ongoing. Now, I think for the last 3–4 years, Cindy has helped. She organized very well because our students came here [to Wyoming] for a long time…

The second project is related to PhD students. In Kazakhstan, it is a requirement from the Ministry of Education that if you will be a Kazakhstan PhD student, you have to get from first course to a supervisor. One should be domestic from the university which you study at, the second should be from abroad…So Mike was the foreign supervisor for our three PhD students, and they graduated well.

The third one is our research projects. We first made some research projects related to the history of journalism, history of radio, and Kazakh history…The main thing now is new media. In Kazakhstan, new media is developing well, and I think it should be the one of the best international research opportunities...because there are not too many joint projects about new media. So, I am looking to work with Cindy because it’s a good topic and it should be the interesting—not just for Kazakhstan, it should be interesting for an international audience.”

Cindy followed up with a few of the cultural experiences visiting students have experienced—such as guitar and rodeo—as well as an example of the education COJO has provided. She also detailed her hopes for the future of the partnership: “Shane [Epping] taught about photojournalism and Mitzi [Stewart] taught about feature writing. And I remember the students were like, ‘Oh, feature writing!’ So that was kind of a new thing for some of the journalism students to think about…that writing different kinds of stories that are more feature-oriented are still a thing that journalists can do.

That's some of what we want to obviously continue to do—and expand it to different faculty—and then also get [UW] grad students interested in going to Kazakhstan. Because the more students that we can have from Wyoming go to Kazakhstan, then the more Kazakh students can come here…If we can do an exchange, then we can develop some more.”

Both Karlyga and Cindy agreed that it is faculty commitment that drives the success of this partnership. “The main thing I want to stress is that the State Department may have helped start this, but it hasn’t that been involved,” Cindy said. “We’re still doing it because it’s a good relationship and it’s fruitful.”

This means finding ways to support and extend on the formal agreement. Karlyga said, “One of the examples for the formal cooperation would be when students came here because students get funding from our government…But when we started to work with our own [research] projects, we didn't have any kind of funding. We were just making an ongoing relationship in the field of research.”

Cindy explained COJO’s ability to provide support through the Four Mile Fund: “So [the Kazakhstan] government paid for the flights, and we paid for their housing while they were here. So that's not funded by their government…In fact, the Four Mile Fund has kindly sponsored Karlyga to be here for these two weeks. And part of that was because I wanted to make sure that she was able to meet with students and with faculty.

And I think it's been really successful. There's been this [presentation] and then last week we had our COJO banquet. And so a lot of the faculty members got to meet her. So now they're like, ‘Oh, I know Karlyga,’ and they're much more likely to want to go over to Kazakhstan—or when Karlyga is in the US to want to meet with her and potentially work with her students.”

 

Karlyga reiterated the relationship aspect, noting that Brown and his wife are like “our second family.”

“When I am inviting or working with foreign professors, I am thinking about a good relationship in the future and how they accept different cultures,” she said. “For example, we respect Mike and Cindy, we respect Wyoming, we respect US professors.”

For both of them, mutual intellectual interests go hand-in-hand with personal support and cultural curiosity. Karlyga noted how much students from KazNU appreciated the effort from UW faculty to make them feel at home when they visited for internships. Cindy explained how cultural exchange was an integral part of student experiences—from the running of small-town newspapers, to public radio, to public access to the state capital. “Last year I took them to the Wyoming Press Association,” said Cindy, “and to the Cheyenne Tribune Eagle and the press that they have there—and then the TV station in Cheyenne, so that they have more exposure to our very localized type of journalism that we have here.”            

Karlyga detailed the effect of COJO’s support. “Around 30 students that came here [to UW], and I think maybe 16 or 17 came back…So this is one good way to say that the cooperation between our universities really had a big impact.

And most of them, when they came here, were not just having a good time seeing how the city looks. They were learning—as Cindy mentioned—about how media developed in the US and what kind of media technology is developing here, or what the modern situation is in the field of social media. So, it means they got new knowledge about the trend of modern journalism. They learned a lot from here.”

Looking to the future, Cindy and Karlyga will take their partnership back to KazNU this September, when Cindy flies there to collaborate with Karlyga on researching online news in Kazakhstan. With a close relationship already established, Cindy said the decision was easy and now that other faculty and students have seen Karlyga’s presentation, it will be easier for others to connect through the partnership as well.

“It’s been a great relationship for the last 12 years and I know it will continue to be for years to come,” Cindy said.