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Parami Institute is a not-for-profit, liberal arts and sciences school in Yangon, Myanmar. Founded in October 2016, the institute was formed as an initiative to improve Myanmar’s education and help students gain study-abroad and vocational opportunities by annually inviting students from Myanmar for the Parami Leadership Program. The school also hosts public events and educational courses such as the “Parami Talk Series."

History
The establishment of Parami Institute dates back to 2003, when former Myanmar Minister of Education, Dr. U Khin Maung Win, and American educators in Myanmar, Dr. Dorothy Guyot and Dr. Jim Guyot created a private, non-proﬁt school called the Pre-Collegiate Program of Yangon (P-CP), with the mission to promote higher education in Myanmar and provide liberal arts education. The graduates of P-CP went on to study abroad for their undergraduate and graduate degrees with the majority of them coming back to Myanmar to work for the development of the nation.

Dr. Kyaw Moe Tun, an alumnus of P-CP and a graduate in Chemistry from Yale University, was inspired by the initiative taken by P-CP and the works of Ashoka University's Young India Fellowship (YIF). Eventually, he decided to set up his own liberal arts and sciences institute (Parami Institute) in October, 2016, and progress on building Myanmar’s very first liberal arts and sciences residential university, Parami University.

Parami Leadership Program (PLP)
Parami Leadership Program is a four-month long interdisciplinary educational program for post-graduates from Myanmar universities. The program offers courses in the liberal arts and sciences such as global economics, comparative politics, humanities, and integrated sciences, and field trips for researching. The graduates of PLP receive a certificate given by Parami Institute in partnership with Bard College New York, which is one of the top-ranking liberal-arts colleges in the United States.

Parami Talk Series
Parami Talk Series is a monthly public event that invites specialist speakers from Myanmar and around the world to present their view of global and local issues that they desire to discuss, followed by a Q&A session with attendees. Some of the speakers and their topics include Vicky Bowman, the Director of Myanmar Centre for Responsible Business who talked about "Corruption and Business in Myanmar – What Needs to Change?" on September 30, 2017, and Scot Marciel, the Ambassador of the United States who talked about "Leadership in a Rapidly Changing World" on March 3, 2017.

Admissions
Annually, the Parami Leadership Program accepts two cohorts of 16 students — one in January and another in August. Admissions to the Parami Leadership Program requires an entrance exam which is hosted every month for three months before the start of every cohort. The exam is four hours long and tests students’ proficiency in English, Mathematics, and Burmese. The English section comprises reading comprehensions, grammar tests, and an argument-based essay; the Mathematics section comprises mathematics puzzles testing critical-thinking and a descriptive essay to explain an interesting phenomenon; the Burmese section comprises a Burmese essay testing the level of literary Burmese.

Courses
In the four and a half month long Parami Leadership Program, there are eight classes per week. Students study liberal education courses such as comparative politics, global economics, humanities and integrated sciences.In addition, students are provided with extracurricular courses such as Writing Workshops, Newsrooms, and bi-weekly summative tutorials of all the classes in the curriculum to improve their writing and thinking skills. Every Friday, students take on research field trips with teams of four accompanied by Parami professors to cooperatively research on a field of their interest. At the end of the program, students are required to create a capstone work, i.e. a research paper, research presentation, or exhibition, depending on the field of work they choose to specialize in. After completing the pogram, a graduation ceremony is held marking the end of the cohort; afterwards, the students move on to their careers through vocational recruits that visit the program, or further their studies abroad.