Abbottabad, one of the most beautiful cities of Pakistan, is named after its founder Maj. James Abbott, who was gifted with Wordsworthian love of nature, selected this site for the headquarters of the district Hazara in 1853. Besides its scenic beauty and healthy environment, the city is currently known for its numerous highly reputed educational institutions, as ‘the city of schools and colleges’. The city now extends from Salhad, in the south, to Abbottabad Public School in the north, over a distance of 12 kilometers. The old city is in close proximity to the southern outskirts, i.e. Salhad.
Mandian, which was once an ordinary peripheral area of Abbottabad, has quickly developed into the hub of the economic activity with its rapid expansion northward. It is now an educational complex of more than a dozen reputed educational institutions. The sprawling, spacious and splendid campus of the Govt. Postgraduate College Mandian Abbottabad is situated in almost the center of this complex.
The college was started in 1990 in a rented building at Kakul road to provide educational facilities to the students of district Abbottabad. Next year, in 1991, it was shifted to and housed in its present campus. Since then, it has been progressing by leaps and bounds. In 1999 it achieved the coveted status of a postgraduate college with the establishment of a postgraduate department of Computer Science. The college has the honour of being the first college of the province to offer M.Sc. Computer Science in the year 2000, followed by the launch of BS (4 Years) semester system of co-education in the year 2010. To promote and facilitate computer science education, the college has three state of the art computer laboratories.
The latest achievement of the college is the establishment of 4-Year BS programs of modern computational and life sciences. The college has a unique distinction of being the first college of the country to start BS Bio-Informatics and the first college of the province offering BS Information Technology in addition to BS Computer Science. To promote knowledge of the life sciences, the college enjoys the privilege of being the first college of the district in which the BS Zoology was started in 2011. Efforts to establish state of the art laboratories for Bioinformatics and Zoology with the help of the provincial government are at the advanced stage. The government is providing unprecedented funds and equipment to realize this objective. It is hoped that the college will uphold its tradition of introducing modern disciplines in future as well.
The college also introduced two new departments, BS Microbiology and Sociology, in 2013 for the first time at the college level. In the year 2017 five new BS programs were started in the subjects of English, Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics and Botany whereas from fall 2018 a new department for BS Urdu was also started. The college administration is making dedicated effort to make the college a seat of learning in the field of modern computational and life sciences.
To achieve this goal, strict vigilance is exercised to ensure peaceful and uninterrupted educational and personality grooming environment in the college campus. The college provides facilities for indoor and outdoor games and regularly participates in sports and cultural events organized by the Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education (B.I.S.E) Abbottabad, Hazara University Mansehra and Abbottabad University of Science & Technology Abbottabad.