I attended the opening ceremony of the 3rd Postgraduate Seminar on campus this morning (read about the 2nd Postgrad Seminar that we organized last year). The opening speech given by the Dean of the Faculty of Science and Technology got me thinking. The speech opened up my eyes to how narrow-minded lecturers can be. How full-of-themselves some academicians can be.
I can’t remember the whole exact speech, but he mentioned something like how postgraduate students doing their Master’s degree can actually save a lot of time and graduate in 3 semesters instead of taking 3 years. He also mentioned that the first Ph.D student he supervised back when he was still in UKM managed to graduate with a Ph.D in only 2 years.
But what he, the Dean, failed to see was that the nature of a student’s program and project strongly determine the duration a student will take to complete his Master’s or Ph.D degree. The Dean himself is a Math-person, and Mathematics students spend most of their time sitting in front of the PC, working on complicated equations and all, fair enough. But for students who run research, we depend very much on the project grant allocated (to go sampling, to buy chemicals, to buy equipments), the subject (turtles, fish, seaweed), the lab (machines, chemicals) and what-not. Even if a student has everything mapped out before he started his project, things could still go wrong, e.g. machines can and will break down, your subject can and will die etc.
As the Head of the Faculty, I’d expect him to be a respectable person, somebody whom we can look up to, somebody whom we know understands our situation, somebody who is willing to listen to our problems as well as somebody who is willing to help us solve them.
Not somebody who benchmarks all his postgraduate students with his Mathematics students and definitely not somebody who makes the rest of us look like we’re not fit enough to be his students. At one point, he even said that he will “sieve” all his postgraduate students and those students who are taking longer than the recommended duration will be asked to discontinue their studies because “it will affect us, lecturers, and it will affect the university.”
I can’t believe I heard that from an academician.
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He’s been out of school too long. He should take up another degree like medicine or some sort and see how fast he can grad
pelf: It’s amazing how ignorant people can be. I don’t have to become a Dean to understand that other postgraduate students do face problems of their own. All it takes is a wee bit of “heart”.
Maybe he’s just frustrated and thus, blocking his thinking, that there’s no more sexy girls to look at. LOL.
pelf: But Terengganu is not ruled by the moon ma. The balance is in power!