My Journey to Becoming an Academic

27 July, Johor Bahru – On 28th July 2022, an online structured course My Journey to Becoming an Academic was organised to share on a young lecturer’s journey from his postgraduate days to being a part of academia. The course is held using Cisco WebEx online conferencing platform. While the structured course was supposed to start at 11 am, it was delayed to around 11.10 am due to a technical issue and ended at 12.30 pm. This course was organised by the Postgraduate Student Society School of Computing (PGSS-SC), with Asraful Syifaa’ Ahmad as the moderator. This session was successfully held with the PGSS-SC committee’s help, Muhammad Zafran Muhammad Zaly Shah, Muhamad Farhin Harun and Muhammad Anwar Ahmad.

The course was originally intended to be held on 4th July 2022, but the speaker was not in good health to give the talk; therefore, it was postponed to the 28th. This course received 321 online registrations on the initial date before it was closed. It was opened again around a week before the replacement date and received another 124 registrations. One hundred sixty-six participants turned up for the event that had registered. There are 62.6% PhD level participants, 13.8% Master’s degree level participants, and 2.4% degree level participants. We also received participation from UTM staff. Additionally, 80.7% are from UTM, and the rest are non-UTM and alums.

The honourable speaker for the program is Dr Muhammad Aliif Ahmad. Dr Muhamad Aliif is a young lecturer in School of Computing, Faculty of Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM), specifically in the Information Engineering and Behavioral Informatics (INFOBEE) Research Group. Previously, he was assigned as a lecturer and Head of Department (Software Engineering) at the UTM branch in Kurdistan, Iraq, which is at Qaiwan International University for a year in 2019. He received his Bachelor of Computer Science (Industrial Computing) from UTM in 2012, Master of Science (Information Technology – Management) in 2013 also in UTM and PhD in Information System from the 65th UTM Convocation Ceremony in 2022.

The course starts at 11.10 am, with the moderator briefly introducing the speaker, Dr Muhamad Aliif’s background. Then, the floor was given to the speaker, and he started with a simple greeting to all the participants and told us he was delighted to share his experience from a postgraduate student until becoming a senior lecturer at UTM. He proceeded to show the general outline of the talk. The first topic is about what he learned during his postgraduate studies. He emphasised five major knowledge that is valuable to prepare for becoming an academic: having good networking, focusing on research publication, mastering research tools and skills, having a small group discussion with fellow researchers and participating in research events.

Afterwards, he shared his experience at Qaiwan International University (QIU). There, he learned more about teaching skills as QIU is a teaching university instead of UTM, a research university. He also learned about student management and managing students with different cultural backgrounds. In the organisational culture, there were others, such as working time and communication; therefore, he had to adapt to that culture. The community engagement was also a part of his experience during his time at QIU, as well as his general personal development. He was also allowed to promote QIU and UTM live on a morning talk show with his colleague. He also joined the Peace Carnival in Hawary Shar and brought Malaysian food to share with the visitors.