Category: Photoblog

When Mary Baghdasaryan from Alaverdi first arrived at the COAF SMART Center in Lori, she was amazed by the size of the hub— her music school’s stage was the only thing that compared to the scale of its amphitheater.

Thirteen-year-old Gor Papoyan from Vanadzor juggles a whirlwind of interests; chess, the “Armath” engineering lab, a programming summer school, SMART classes, and traditional karate. At the very top of his “interests podium,” SMART and karate share first place.

Five years ago, Nane Simonyan from the village of Akori in Armenia’s Lori Province hopped on the “Akori-SMART train” at the very last moment—just one day before applications closed.
“I hadn’t heard about the first round of admissions and was very upset. I couldn’t miss the next one. When I came to the Center, it felt like I had stepped into a real fairy tale,” says the now-veteran SMART student.

Elen Kharatyan from the village of Dsegh in Lori first stepped into the SMART Center at just eight years old—and she hasn’t been away for long since.

She says every program at SMART has something special to offer, but the ones closest to her heart are Dance, Drawing, and Russian. Right now, she’s especially excited about joining the AgriTech program.

Once the bassist of Vanadzor’s beloved band Clocker, and later a trombone player during his army service, Sevada Hovhannisyan now brings his musical journey full circle as the Sound Design instructor at the COAF SMART Center in Lori.

Narek’s older brother may have joined SMART first, but it didn’t take long for the roles to reverse. Soon, everyone was calling his older brother “Narek’s brother, Manvel.”

The SMART Center in Lori is the setting for the pivoting point in many young student’s stories: the place they discovered their passion, discovered themselves, and sometimes both. This is the story of one such young adult.