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!"