Their senior counterparts may have left the Varsity Cup competition a bit prematurely, but the NWU Eagles Young Guns aimed to go all the way when they squared off against Tuks in Stellenbosch on Monday, 25 April. It was not to be. The team from Pretoria, doing what Pretoria-based teams seem to be doing in every conceivable rugby competition in South Africa over the past year, beat the Eagles Young Guns 22–14. 

It is not the fairy-tale ending the boys were hoping for, but the journey proved to be memorable. 

It was love at first sight. Boy meets campus. In 2019, Franco van Dijk visited the North-West University (NWU) campus in Potchefstroom as part of a tour by his school choir.

“We saw a lot of the campus – it almost felt like an open day. I really liked what I saw and decided that this was where I wanted to go,” says Franco, who matriculated from the Ligbron Academy of Technology.  

Franco, who was born in Bethal, Mpumalanga, will be turning 19 in May and is enrolled in his first year of working towards a degree in Electromechanical Engineering.

For this young woman entrepreneurship is a way of life. North-West University (NWU) master’s student in chemistry, Paula Maseko, recently started her own business by producing and selling haircare products.

Paula, who hails from Lonelypark in Mahikeng, started her business in 2020 in her mother’s garage. With a few pots, bowls, a hand blender and a two-plate stove, Buhle Bomqhele hair cream and growth oil were born.

Blood is the life-giving substance that flows through our veins, but if the pressure in our veins becomes too high it can be detrimental to our health.

Academia’s “best kept secret” is rising like a phoenix after the pandemic. The prestigious North-West University (NWU) Business School held a Brag & Brand function in Potchefstroom on Monday, 26 April that was attended by lecturers, staff and alumni.

Prof Linda du Plessis, acting vice-chancellor of the NWU, welcomed guests and said “a good school should have legitimacy”. She boasted that the NWU Business School had achieved accreditation for another five years from the Association of MBAs.

The North-West University (NWU) has appointed a specialist in information technology (IT) governance, risk and business engagement as the university’s digital strategy officer.
Andile Swartbooi will serve in this capacity from 1 May 2022 onwards.

His responsibilities will include the execution of the NWU’s digital strategy, focusing on its four pillars: intentional experience; operating efficiency; business model changes and enablers.

The North-West University (NWU) continues to shine in global rankings. In the latest rankings, the Center for World University Rankings (CWUR) placed the NWU in the top 4,5% of universities in their 2022/2023 edition of the Global 2000 list. This is an improvement from being in the top 4,7% in last year’s ranking.

This outstanding achievement was published on 25 April on the cwur.org website. The NWU was ranked according to academic performance among 19 788 universities worldwide.

Jacques Beukes of the MUST Deep Learning research group at the Faculty of Engineering is the 2021 winner of a North-West University (NWU) Vice-Chancellor’s Medal for his dissertation “Interpretability of deep neural networks for SYM-H prediction”. Eight vice-chancellor’s medals are awarded annually to the best master’s-degree students at the NWU. Jacques was awarded the medal for Engineering.

The Indigenous Knowledge System (IKS) Centre of the North-West University (NWU) has partnered with Wits University to do palaeontology research along the Karoo Basin.

The IKS Centre team comprises Prof Simeon Materechera, a senior professor and research leader for the NWU team, and Otsile Maditsi, a lecturer at the centre. They are working with the Wits team to explore the indigenous knowledge associated with palaeontology.

The IKS Centre will focus on indigenous paleo-knowledge which consists of geomythology associated with palaeontology.

He is no longer the reigning, defending, undisputed Two Oceans Half-Marathon champion. However, Elroy Gelant transcends the above-mentioned moniker. After the 2020 and 2021 half-marathons had been scrapped due to the Covid-19 pandemic, on Sunday, 17 April 2022 Gelant relinquished the title he had won in 2019. Yet he again showed the grit and resolve that have been hallmarks of his exceptional career. Gelant claimed silver, which is a great achievement that is made exceptional if one takes into consideration the thigh muscle injury he sustained at the 2021 Olympic Games in Japan.