- Beyond the Lecture Hall: ISBS Is Redefining Student Care in Botswana’s Higher Education
- A Culture That Shapes Futures
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In the quiet hum of Gaborone’s academic quarter, where the rhythm of ambition meets the murmur of possibility, stands the Imperial School of Business and Science (ISBS) — a private tertiary institution with a public spirit. Its reputation, built on steady excellence, rests not only on the rigour of its academic programmes but on something far rarer: the deep, deliberate care it shows its students.
Walk through its corridors and you’ll find more than lecture rooms and laboratories. You’ll find open doors — lecturers leaning across desks to guide a hesitant hand through a difficult accounting formula; administrators patiently helping a first-year student navigate scholarship paperwork; and peers trading ideas in corners that have become informal study sanctuaries. At ISBS, support isn’t a service. It’s a culture.
“We teach minds, but we also build people,” says one senior lecturer, reflecting a philosophy that has quietly defined the institution’s growth since its founding. Academic staff are trained to notice — to see the struggle behind the silence, to offer extra tutorials where comprehension falters, and to ensure that learning never becomes an isolating experience. “ISBS is a home away from home for every student,” another staff member notes. “Here, no one is ever left to walk their journey alone.”
This attentiveness extends far beyond the classroom. Counsellors and student welfare officers maintain a presence that is both formal and familial — available to listen, advise, and intervene when personal challenges threaten to derail a student’s progress. Their office lights stay on late, a telling symbol of a school that refuses to let anyone fall behind.
Yet, ISBS’s care doesn’t end when lectures do. For many students living off-campus, support takes a different form: safe housing, access to health services, recreational activities, and the kind of soft monitoring that reminds them someone is still watching out for them. “We don’t teach in isolation,” says a member of the student affairs team. “The world outside affects the mind inside.”
What makes the ISBS model striking is the seamless blend of academic discipline with emotional intelligence. Each programme — from business management and accounting to information technology and health sciences — is threaded with mentorship. Senior students mentor juniors, while alumni return to offer workshops on career readiness and entrepreneurship. The result is a living, breathing network of continuity: one generation lighting the path for another.
Inside the main library, the air hums with quiet determination. Rows of students are deeply engaged in their assignments, while the school’s Wi-Fi-enabled digital platforms hum with research activity — all made possible through the free tablets provided to every learner to enhance technological connectivity. Across campus, the energy is collaborative rather than competitive — a culture cultivated by faculty who measure success not by grades alone, but by the confidence that accompanies understanding.
Beyond academics, ISBS encourages the pursuit of wholeness. Debate clubs sharpen minds; sports and creative societies foster balance; volunteer projects teach empathy and civic engagement. Here, personal growth is not a by-product of education — it is education itself.
And so, when graduation season arrives — when proud parents fill the courtyard and students in blue gowns clasp their certificates with trembling hands — the moment feels less like an ending than a renewal. Each graduate carries not only knowledge but the imprint of a place that believed in them long before the world did.
In a landscape where education often feels transactional, the Imperial School of Business and Science stands as a reminder of what learning was always meant to be: a shared human journey, marked by discipline, dignity, and care.
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