Akif Syed

Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

Director General

Born in a family of teachers, I spent most of my first 20 odd years at the Karachi university campus. In between, five of my early years (between ages 8 and 15) were spent abroad: two in New York where my father was a Fulbright scholar at Columbia University and three in Osaka, Japan where he was a Visiting Professor at the University of Foreign Studies. Although my first degree was in microbiology, the process of self-discovery (in Mark Twain's words "not letting schooling interfere with education") opened new vistas: After a short stint as a copy-writer in Pakistan's largest ad agency, I appeared for the highly competitive civil service examination and secured the first position in Pak