Kursus Kenegaraan

20 - 24 March 2008 @ Kem Bina Negara, Ulu Seperi, NS

This is another requirement from MOHE. For this programme there were 127 soon-to-be overseas students who came from various Public Higher Learning Institutions (IPTA) as well as those who are from several government agencies.

They will either pursue Master, PhD or Sub-Specialist (for local doctors who would like to become speacialists) programmes all over the world. I met a lot of new friends here, and what amazed me was majority of them aged 30 years and below! (the youngest was 27 years old)

Imagine if an average spending by government to send these students to overseas is RM300,000 per person - for 127 of them, the Government shall fork out a hefty RM38 million!!! This is the cost for our own Human Capital Development...

There were some hard lessons that I learnt throughout the 5-day event - love and protect our own nation.

Pembentangan Peringkat Lembaga Akademik

17 March 2008, @ 2.30 pm

It was conducted by the Faculty's Academic Board for the successful scholarship holders. This is one of the requirements that the scholarship holders needed to adhere.

For this session, there were 9 board members, chaired by the Dean of the Faculty, and only 6 of us at that moment. I was made the third presenter.

Prior than the session, a memo was sent to us indicating the documents that needed to be brought along. I prepared and binded 10 copies of the documents for each Board members. The documents were:

1. A copy of the ppt slide presentation.
2. Offer of Admission letter from ECU.
3. Confirmation of Acceptance from ECU
4. ECoE from the Austalian Government
5. CV of my Supervisor
6. CV of myself
7. Comments made by my supervisor on my proposal.

The presentation went smoothly. There were only two questions directed to me. The Dean seems to be satisfied with my presentation (I hope the other Board members have the same feelings too), as he was basically impressed with my supervisor's background (27 pages of CV!!).

The Dean then reminded each one of us to excel in our studies.

Taklimat Biasiswa 2008

3 March 2008

The briefing session was held at JPbSM office in Shah Alam. It was held specifically for the 2008's overseas scholarship holders, where the purpose of the session was basically to give detail explanation about scholarships arrangements and to hand over various scholarship forms that need to be filled up and returned to JPbSM in various stages (there are a lot of forms to be filled up).

There are those who are bound to US, UK, Canada, Aust, NZ, Japan, India, German, France and even Singapore and Thailand. There is also a Q & A session for those who have doubts about various scholarship requirements.

The session was made formal. Dr ZM, the Registrar, took the stand to deliver her opening speech, where she explained about the responsibilities of a scholarship holders. She cited few cases on how some of these scholarship holders breached their scholarship agreements. She advised that, "scholarship is not your rights, but it's a privilege. So, please honor this privilege..."

Then Prof A, one of the DVCs, presented a paper on reasons why some of the uni's Phd scholarship holders failed to complete their studies. Though their numbers are small, but to date there have been about 100+- cases of PhD casualities (representing 10% from total PhD students to date). The top reason on why these students fail to complete their studies was lack of supervisors' commitment (as claimed by them). The second top reason was lack of family commitment.

She motivated us by saying that the Phd does not requires one to be genius, but one needs to have high perseverance. She cynically reminded us by saying that "don't be part of the samples for my future study!"