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ZNotes: a journey in identity
It’s surreal looking at the original ZNotes logo and realising that 15-year-old-Zubair’s free WordPress blog still lives and has grown to a point where brand guidelines and trademarking has to be done! “Why is it called ZNotes?” “Because you’re Zubair..?” Well, yes and no. The decision was really made by an algorithm. You see when I first arrived on WordPress.com to register a sub-domain, my initial choice of ‘studynotes.wordpress.com’ had already been registered and as it had my name on the account, the form suggested “zstudynotes”. I’d been sitting there trying different permutations of ‘revision’, ‘study’ and ‘notes’ and tired of it all, I just clicked proceed. I didn’t imagine…
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Educated by Tara Westover
I’m bad with non-fiction. Maybe it’s because I associate it with dense maths journals and research papers? But it tends to happen that I end up slinking away from the non-fiction table in Waterstone’s, instead looking for a magical, fantasy world to run away to. But this habit has slowly been changing and my biggest champion for the case of reading non-fiction is my last read: Educated, a memoir by Tara Westover. Award-winning and hugely recommended book from everywhere, I was set up with high expectation. In a nutshell, it follows Tara’s life; born in rural Idaho to a family of ‘survivalists’, who don’t believe in many things and in…
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About Me
I started ZNotes as a 16 year old completing my iGCSEs, a platform for high-quality crowd-sourced exam revision notes and today, it has crossed over 20 million hits and reached over 2.5 million learners and educators from across the world. I’m on a mission of making it possible for anyone, anywhere to make their life better through access to education and hugely passionate about UNSDG4. Alongside running ZNotes, I am actively involved in the startup and Ed-Tech sphere of London, excited by how technologies like AI and AR/VR can finally transform the education system. I provide mentorship at hackathons and deliver talks to inspire students and emerging entrepreneurs at schools…
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The Social Venture Weekend in Cambridge
Rumbling through an ombré British countryside, Friday brought me to the quirky building of the Judge Business School for the Social Venture Weekend run by Cambridge Social Ventures – a packed out two-and-a-half days of intensive training for people on the journey of building and growing a business with an inherent positive social mission. Day 1 It all kicked off with an academically rigorous lecture on the importance and impact of social ventures and helped bring light the different models of how social ventures are currently being run. It continued with an introduction to the theory of change and how social impact should be measured. For the last bit, I…
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The Brick Lane Market
This reading week has become more of a writing one! As I write another blog post after sending a draft of my research project (dedicated post for that coming up) to my supervisor and start planning out my personal statement – quite a bit of writing for me! Living in East London for over a year now, I realised I still hadn’t taken sis around the Brick Lane and Shoreditch area – hipster London. So, slightly under the weather, we took a short bus to Whitechapel and walked a winding route to Brick Lane. Super nostalgic as I remember coming in my first year with my then new friends –…
