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26 August 2022 | Story Anthony Mthembu | Photo Supplied
Katleho Nkosi
Katleho Nkosi’s design, which won him second place in the national design competition during the Student Entrepreneurship Week 2022.

Katleho Nkosi, a fourth-year Education student at the University of the Free State (UFS), obtained second place in a national design competition hosted virtually by Entrepreneurship Development in Higher Education (EDHE). 

The national design competition formed part of the launch of the Student Entrepreneurship Week 2022, which took place at the University of Venda on 18 August 2022. As such, students from many of the universities in the country, including Nkosi, took part in designing a poster that would be used to advertise the event. 

Nkosi is delighted and excited about this accomplishment. “This win was really surprising and unbelievable for me, because obtaining the second-place position means that my work is good,” said Nkosi.

The participants were allowed to conceptualise and submit their final product between 28 June and 15 July 2022. “I had no experience in this space, I only designed content for fun, and I participated in this competition because I was motivated by a friend,” Nkosi highlighted. 

Click to view document  Click here to view poster in full size.


The motivation behind the design

Since the Student Entrepreneurship Week was held at the University of Venda, Nkosi used the vibrancy and colourfulness of Venda as inspiration for his design. “When I was designing the poster, the only thing on my mind was making sure that I put something together that was related to Venda,” he explained. In addition, the theme for the Entrepreneurship Week was ‘Move to Market’, and Nkosi asserts that he tried to integrate the theme with Venda, and this is how the design came about.

The outcome of the competition and future plans

Although Nkosi did not win the competition, he did receive a cash prize for being among the top three. Furthermore, given his accomplishment, Nkosi would like to take part in many more design competitions moving forward. “Now that I have realised that I have the potential to win, I think I can take this as a career path in the future,” he said. Nkosi is also looking at merging his love of teaching with his newfound love for design. “I’m going to try and find the connection between design and education, because I really love to teach, so I could perhaps become a design teacher,” Nkosi expressed

News Archive

Stochastic Modelling for Reliability from Russia
2013-12-20

 

 Prof Maxim (MS) Finkelstein’s
The Russian professor first visited our university in 1993 and loved the environment. For the last 15 years we were fortunate to have had a man of Prof Maxim (MS) Finkelstein’s (65) stature as part of our Department of Mathematical Statistics.

“I like the atmosphere, the environment and the people of the UFS,” says Prof Finkelstein. “The UFS is a real campus, not part of the city as a lot of other universities in South Africa.”

Prof Finkelstein completed his MSc in Mathematical Physics from the Leningrad State University in the USSR in 1971. Maths and Physics have been a passion of his since a young age. In 1979, Prof Finkelstein completed his PhD in Mathematical Theory of Reliability at Leningrad Elektropribor Institute. Before his career at our university, Prof Finkelstein was a Senior Researcher at St. Petersburg Elektropribor Institute and an Associate Professor at Leningrad Technological Institute.

His long list of publications includes over 170 papers and five books. His monograph Failure Rate Modelling for Reliability and Risk was published by Springer in 2008. More recently another monograph – which was co-authored with JH Cha – was published by Springer in April 2013 and is called Stochastic Modelling for Reliability: Shocks, Burn-in, and Heterogeneous Populations.

Prof Finkelstein’s research interests include mathematical theory of reliability, survival analysis, risk and safety modelling, stochastic processes and stochastics in demography. When asked about leisure and life outside of research, the devoted academic’s response was as follows…

“To have publications, you have to work all the time. I work half of Saturdays and most of Sundays,” Prof Finkelstein says. “I spend three months a year in Russia and Germany – mostly during the European summer – for my research.”
“But apart from that, I like reading – classical Russian authors mostly. I swim in the UFS’s swimming pool almost every day and I play tennis as well.”

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