A free online assistant for applicants who are children of war has been launched in Ukraine
For more than three years in a row, Ukrainian schoolchildren are growing up to the sound of air raids, among the ruins of their hometowns, and with the thought not only of extracurricular activities, but also of evacuation, loss of homes or loved ones. Children of war are teenagers who already at the age of 16-17 know what fear, loss, and responsibility are. But in spite of everything, they continue to prepare for admission, dream about the future and make plans that are difficult to call normal for a generation that grew up in peace. Choosing a profession for such children is not just about finding an interesting job. This is a search for a way to stability, security, realization. This is the desire to become useful to one’s country at a time when every specialist is worth its weight in gold. Someone wants to be a doctor because he saw medics rescuing the wounded during shelling. Someone dreams of engineering because they want to strengthen the country’s defense. Someone wants to stay in Ukraine because they believe that the youth is what keeps this country alive.
In this context, volunteering appeared project Abitly.org, created specifically to support Ukrainian applicants during the war. Its main goal is to give every student, regardless of where he is now – in a front-line village, a temporarily occupied city or in an evacuation abroad – access to honest, understandable and structured information about higher education in Ukraine.
The platform is absolutely free. It is in beta, but already offers a set of powerful tools that allow you to make an informed and strategic choice of major, university and even admission tactics.
One of the key functions of the site is StudSearch — a service that allows you to communicate with real students of Ukrainian universities. Not through official advertising or “painted” websites of universities, but directly — live communication with those who are already studying. Applicants can find out what student life really looks like, what happens in the dormitories, whether there is corruption in the chosen university, what the conditions are for conscripted students or IDPs.
The NMT competitive score calculator also works on the platform, which allows you to accurately and without errors calculate the chances of admission depending on the results. The tool is especially useful for choosing the fourth subject — because it is often the decisive one. The user can enter his results from the main subjects — Ukrainian language, mathematics and history of Ukraine — choose the fourth subject and immediately see how his choice will affect the overall competitive score, as well as determine which subject combinations offer the best chances for admission to the desired university.
The founder of the platform, Vladyslav Bandurin, emphasizes: introduction is not only knowledge, but also strategy. It is the right strategy that can become an advantage for Ukrainian youth in a world where Russia claims to have a million engineers that it will supposedly train in three years. According to Bandurin, our only answer is not quantity, but quality.
“If we want to win, we have to train the best specialists. We must give every teenager a chance to realize himself – not to run away, not to dissolve somewhere in Europe, but to stay and build a new Ukraine”, — notes the Abitly team.
It is important that the resource was created by Ukrainian student volunteers who understand the situation on the ground, the complexity of the realities for applicants, psychological pressure and unequal access to quality information. Abitly is designed to reduce this inequality, to make knowledge accessible – even if a child is sitting in a village without normal internet, even if he has lost relatives, even if he does not know if he will be safe tomorrow. Because education is what keeps the country going. And it is the children of war who can make it strong.
