Your Title Goes Here
A postgraduate study is not an easy or smooth journey. It is demanding, challenging, exhausting and stressful, comprising of sleepless nights and much learning to do in a short period. As postgraduate students, we should know how to manage our time while appreciating every journey embarks on in our study. Though postgraduate study might be challenging, the goals need to be set back for the students to feel ambitious to complete their postgraduate studies. Challenges need to be overcome; otherwise, the postgraduate students’ motivation might be lost. Therefore, the Post-Graduate Student Society, Faculty Social Sciences and Humanities (PGSS FSSH) collaborates with the School of Post-Graduate Students (SPS) for having a program entitled “Happiness through a Postgraduate Study”, which was held on Thursday, 24th March 2022. This program is handled by the PGSS team, with Ms Hanes Binti Abd Halim as a program director.
This program is lasted for 2 hours, starting from 2.30 pm until 4.30 pm through the online platform, Webex. Furthermore, there is a question-and-answer session between the panels and participants at the end of the session. Out of 126 pre-registrations, only 75 students are joining the program on the day. The majority is of doctorate students (from year 1 to year 2), with 43 participants and 18 participants from UTM Master Students. 9 participants joined from the Undergraduate program. In contrast, the remaining balance of participants came from UTM Staff, Non-UTM, Graduate students, and Students from other universities. The speaker invited was a senior experience lecturer of the School of Human Resource Development and Psychology (SHARPS) in UTM Johor Bahru who has served UTM since 2002, Dr Nor Akmar Nordin. She was also positioned as a Director of Psychology at the School of Human Resource Development and Psychology.
The speaker explained clearly about the student’s responsibility to set back their aims to complete their postgraduate studies successfully. The speaker did mention about psychological aspects and individual elements that the students need to find to achieve fluctuated level of happiness. The speaker also advice the students to approach their feeling whether it is positive or negative feeling. The honoured speaker told the participant that as a normal student, it is normal of them to have a happy and bad days. Everything is depending on us, how we shift our feelings.
“When you have resilience, you have focus” – Dr Nor Akmar Nordin
Based on the feedback given by the participants, this program was indeed meaningful and beneficial in terms of psychological aspects, especially to all the postgraduate students in building back their motivation to complete their postgraduate studies. Participants also claimed that this program was a good session that helped them out of the blue of the study. Besides, the speaker was very sociable, which gave the students an easy mind to express what they felt throughout their postgraduate studies. Therefore, in the future, participants hope that a more similar program is initiated by the PGSS so that it can help students set back their minds happily in postgraduate study.
Report by:
Nurul Amira Nabila Binti Abd Halim
Secretary of “Happiness through a Postgraduate Study”
