On October 21st 2021, an online structured course entitled ‘Improving Your Productivity to Maximize Your Research Output As A PhD Student’ was organized to share tips on being more productive and planning to Graduate on time (GoT). The structured course started at 10.00 am and ended at 12.00 pm using Cisco Webex online conferencing platform. This course was organized by the Postgraduate Student Society School of Computing (PGSS-SC), with Muhammad Luqman Mohd Shafie as the moderator. This session was successfully held with the PGSS-SC committee’s help Muhammad Zafran Muhammad Zaly Shah, Muhamad Farhin bin Harun, and Asraful Syifaa’ Ahmad. The honourable speaker for the course is Prof. Ts. Dr. Dayang Norhayati Bte Abang Jawawi, Associate Chair (Academic and Student Development), School of Computing, Faculty of Engineering, UTM JB. As an academic staff in UTM since 1996. As an important figure in academic and student development at the school level, the speaker has broad experience in creating a better research environment for School of Computing students, bringing out the various talent in them. Besides that, Prof. Ts. Dr. Dayang currently has 71 student which 31 student is PhD student. Hence, she is more than suitable to provide talks that involve maximizing potential in research students.
This course received 369 online registrations, and 178 participants turned up for the event. There are 77.53% PhD students, 19.66 % Master degree students, and 2.80% Bachelor students from various universites. We also received participation from UTM staff. Additionally, 75.84% are from UTM, and the rest is non-UTM.
The course starts by introducing and summarizing some background of the speaker. In general, research students should have a reason for what they want to be when pursuing a postgraduate degree. The speaker introduced research degree programs offered in the school of computing—the information including mode of study, compulsory course, types of PhD research and publication requirement. By knowing the requirements of the research program, we can analyse certain parameters to produce a productive researcher habit and improve output by the research students. The main goal for research students is to obtain either a master’s degree or a PhD degree within a certain time. School also has some objectives that need to be achieved to produce a charismatic and respectful research student. However, for the students themselves, planning your study is important to GoT. In addition, the plans usually are non-linear as the semesters go. A timeline can be constructed by planning according to your productivity level and considering other parameters (current semester, deferment, publication, etc.). Considering you can follow the timeline, GoT is possible. However, some parameters are out of our control, such as the Covid-19 lockdown, which limited our communication and productivity. In every challenge, there is a point of view that contains the solution and opportunity. In short, during any challenge, you should do whatever things that you can control.
Before closing the course, a QnA session is conducted where participants drop their questions and the moderator voiced out to the speaker to give out the answer. Most questions are about administration workflow related to postgraduate study. Before closing the session, a photo session is conducted by our committee with the speaker and all participants. The participants appreciate all the efforts by the SPS UTM and PGSS SC as the organizers. Additionally, 176 participants rate this structured course 4 and 5 stars in terms of the overall rating. This course outcome is a kick start for PGSS SC to organize more sharing sessions like this.
