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Speaker 1: Good evening. Welcome to UTS, and more importantly, welcome to the Faculty of
Engineering and IT. Now, I hope you realise that ah -- who's engineers, by the way? Who
are planning to become engineers? What about IT guys? Now let's have both sets of hands
up, for both of you. Because guess what? You can't really separate engineering and IT at
all, because you think of things like this -- do you recognise this? No, it's not a Nokia
-- it's an iPhone, right? And you can have things like an Android as well, or you could
have many, many devices we can't separate. This has apps -- IT. But it's got a lot of
hardware -- engineering. Telecommunications. You name it. The only thing it doesn't have
it biomedical, it doesn't have civil engineering, includes mechanical, lots of things are integrated
together. So guess what? We're in the appropriate faculty for the future. You think of it -- everything
involves engineering and IT at some point, including this fancy place. Huge amount of
engineering to keep those bits not falling on us, and a lot of IT for things like the
presentation. For example, that screen that's not working. So, as you understand, technology
is about problem solving. The essence is, engineers and IT, you problem-solve, so everything
we do circulates around the skills and abilities that we will eventually learn -- even me.
We are always learning; we are fellow students. So, biomedical is an area that's very important.
And I don't know -- you can't see it; I might pop it out. Bluetooth-enabled hearing aids.
Fancy stuff. IT, biomedical, the whole lot. My uncle has a Cochlear implant -- another
interesting thing to have -- implanted into his brain. Fancy things. So I'd like to introduce
you to a very important pioneer in the field of biomedical engineering ... hope it works
... yes! It does work. Technology works. Um, Professor Hung Nguyen. He's relatively famous
-- sorry, not relatively -- IS famous, for medical and engineering and IT integration,
and he's actually been recently asked to lead UTS's innovation as the Associate Deputy Vice
Chancellor of Innovation for UTS. He's had a big promotion, but for the moment you're
still our dean -- hopefully you'll stay our dean. I'd like you to welcome Professor Hung
Nguyen. [Applause]
Thank you. Speaker 2: Thank you very much, Chris. I'll
try to use this one. Um, good afternoon everyone and I'm very pleased to see so many people
here. Last time we only had half, because we only had IT, but this time both engineering
and IT, it's very exciting time for me. So, as Chris has said, my name is Hung Nguyen,
and I'm the Dean of the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology. So I would like
to welcome all our new engineering and IT students to UTS. A bit on the new building:
at UTS, we're spending around $1 billion on UTS Campus Master Plan. And around May or
June this year, we will move to a new Broadway building, which I thought is a very breathtaking
design from Australian architects, Denton Corker Marshall. The building will house the
Faculty of Engineering and IT, and really exemplify everything that UTS stands for.
World-class, state-of-the-art, we're actually green, five-star rating. We tried to get further,
but we couldn't. Very distinctive, and a fusion of creativity and technology. And we will
have highly flexible, innovative teaching facilities -- allow you to experiment with
different types of teaching, collaborative groups and so on, but maybe later we will
have an amazing surround 3D interactive data arena; innovative industry hubs for start-up
companies, maybe a few of you will be able to start start-ups; and a showcase display
area of our inventions to allow you to have a glimpse of our technological future. And
also on the roof we have solar collectors, and also wind generators and fuel cells as
well. So we're trying to be as green as we can.
The faculty's structure comprises four portfolio areas. We have teaching and learning, research
and development, external engagement and international, each led by an associate dean. We have five
schools, and our schools tend to be quite big. The first one is civil and environmental
engineering; the second one is computing and communications; third one is electrical, mechanical
and mechatronic systems -- actually, biomedical engineering is part of that as well; the School
of Software, number four; and number five, system management and leadership. And each
led by a head of school. And in 2012, we had, it's about 7500 students with around 5300
undergraduates, 1800 postgrad, and it's about 450 research students. Currently we have close
to about 500 PhD and Masters students. So we have 243 academic and research staff, and
127 support staff. The Faculty of Engineering and Information
Technology is widely regarded as a leader in practice-based education and research.
We actually were ranked in the top band for outstanding teaching performance until the
government stopped the ranking for teaching. In the research Excellence in Research for
Australia evaluation in 2012, the faculty received world-class standard for both information
and computer sciences, and also for engineering. Specifically, we have achieved world-class
in information systems, civil engineering, electrical and electronic engineering and
mechanical engineering. In addition, the faculty achieved above world-class in artificial intelligence
and image processing, and biomedical engineering. So the Faculty of Engineering and Information
Technology plays a very significant role for UTS to be, again, we place in the top 500
universities in 2013, and that means it's about three years in a row, according to the
academic rankings of world universities. And for performance by broad subject fields in
... this year, engineering, technology and computer science, we ranked in the top 200
in the world. For performance by subject fields, computer science made it to the top 150. In
2013/2014, UTS also made it to the top 350 in the Times Higher Education World Ranking,
and in 2013, if you're looking at the university under 50 years, we rank 83 in the world.
My own research has a very strong connection between both engineering and IT. I started
off as an electrical engineer, used to build big power electronics machine, and it actually
could move this building. And I then move into robotics and mechatronics, and design
intelligent robot which could play chess and Connect 4. That's about 20 years ago. This
robot hated losing, and it would learn to play differently to avoid, you know, to be
losing again and that sort of thing. And then I was fascinated with biomedical engineering
and neuroscience, so my team has designed various form of thought-controlled wheelchairs,
which can provide mobility independence for people with severe disabilities, and also
we designed a non-invasive monitoring device to detect low blood sugar without taking blood
-- non-invasive and continuously. So you can see that we used IT and engineering extensively
to develop innovative medical devices, and intelligent mechatronic systems.
UTS engineering and IT in particular has very strong industry connections and high achieving
students through our commitment to cooperative education. And in 2012, our undergraduate
full-time employment rate was more than 85% and postgrad full-time employment rate was
close to 85% for both engineering and IT, and we are actually always leading in that
space. Several of our graduates have secured top positions in industry, and some have founded
their own companies as well. And um, one has actually created a company probably worth
half a billion dollars. Our Women in Engineering and IT unit has done
an outstanding job in attracting more women into its undergraduate programs by communicating
the broader concept of engineering and IT, and I'm very pleased to have a good presence
of women in our students here, and actually it's very [inaudible] in that way. We outlining
the diverse career options and providing role models to young girls through programs such
as Sydney Women in Engineering and Information Technology Speakers Program. So that's about
it for me, so now I would like to invite Mr Chris Wong to introduce -- to get back to
the ... [Applause]
Speaker 1: Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you Hung. It's great to see that we
have such an enthusiastic and interesting dean. He actually will inspire most of us
-- well, the whole university unfortunately gets the whole of him, not just us now. Can
I ask a quick question? Who's doing creative intelligence? Bachelor of Engineering or Bachelor
of IT Creative Intelligence? Yeah, a few little hands going like that. You're in a world-leading
degree. It has just literally started this year so it's a chance to see new things. And
I've actually been invited to go to the kick-off, so it'll be quite interesting seeing it. Some
of the people involved involve left brain right brain stuff; that's beside the point.
Anyway, to introduce myself ... try not to get seasick. You've seen Hung. I run the IT
undergraduate program, so a quick show of hands: who's Bachelor of Science, Bachelor
of Games, or ... only a few! Okay, I'm the minority here. Sorry guys. I am, I'm ... um,
Anthony Caddy's not here at the moment; he's my equivalent for engineering. Who's the Bachelor
of Engineering? Whoa, a few of those. Okay, good to see. Um, Rob Jarman used to be the
director of undergraduate programs; in some ways he's still training Anthony, I hope,
and he runs the whole teaching and learning aspect of the faculty, so if you have problems
with me, that's the guy to go to. He's my boss, so I say 'Yes sir.' Okay? Rene's not
here -- where is Rene? He's somewhere overseas at the moment -- in his place at the moment
is Alan Sixsmith, who will answer questions later about the postgraduate IT program. Who's
the postgraduate IT students? Oh, a lot -- good to see. Okay. So, Hung actually described
-- I have to keep turning my head ... Prasanthi, sorry! Prasanthi runs the engineering postgraduate
program, so let's see the hands for the postgraduates -- engineers, that is. Oh, about the same
as IT -- that's cool. Okay. Hung already described the structure, verbally, to you. This is the
visual version of it. Now, one important thing to remember when you do your degree; we are
divided into five school. So civil engineering's obvious; electrical and mechanical's another
obvious one; there three IT-related schools and management schools, so you will see a
lot of staff. Apart from us, you'll also see what we call course coordinators -- those
who run the civil engineering program, those who run the IT management program, so you'll
see some people up there you can actually talk to as well -- you can talk to [Jiao Liu
]-- oh, not [Jiao Liu] anymore. I don't have the schools up there. You'll talk to different
coordinators, which we will talk about later; they're the people who actually help you with
problems with your course. So, um, anybody got any questions you want to ask at this
point? We'll do questions at the end, if you don't mind. I have to keep turning my head
now, unfortunately. The screen's not working. SO, one of the objectives of the faculty welcome,
apart from getting you up and interested, is to tell you how to find information, on
how to do things. If you ever go into any of the buildings with IT and engineering-based
labs, the very first page you're going to see if the My FEIT website. We're not sure
if it's called My Feet or My Fate; it's up to you -- you'll hear us say both. It's the
homepage for the faculty, so that's where you'll find all the information. We've got
the UTS webpage, but this is by default in all workstations. So at the top, you can see
that we have links -- menus, dare I call it? I don't know if this laser pointer will work.
It doesn't work up there. We've got links that tell us how to get support information.
A good one for most of you will be courses. There's a link at the top call 'courses'.
If you want information like templates on your course, that's where you get it from,
okay? It's a very important place. The other important place to get things from
is the UTS Handbook. That gives you the subject descriptions, so if you want to know 'What
is Web Systems?' or 'What is Programming of Fundamentals?', it describes in most details
for you. When you start your class next week -- so do go to lectures next week -- you'll
get a subject outline, and we'll talk about that in a moment as well. That's really the
contract between us and you on how to do the subject, the schedule and all those sort of
details. The handbook doesn't give you the schedule details, because sometimes it changes,
and the most important thing is the student -- I know, you've got it in your hand, big
piece of paper, you've got it? Who's missing? That's called the Student Guide. For those
of you who love electronic -- I notice you don't have one -- oh, it's in your bag -- it's
a PDF version as well. So I like to get my little iPad out and browse it through that.
It's got the name of all your contacts and everything in this presentation is in there
-- okay, you can leave now. Nup, okay, you're not. Good. That was a joke, by the way, in
case you don't get it. Other places to get is the UTS homepage. Um,
I don't know about you, I find it a bit hard to find information. It's easy to use -- it's
a modern, high-tech page. Who's IT students again? Who's doing internet working, or planning
to do internet working? It's actually hosted in the cloud, a place called Amazon Hosting
Services -- it's a good thing to look it up one day. So that's where our homepage lives;
we put it there because it's more resilient to denial of service attacks, so security
engineering. We get hit all the time; it survives on Amazon, so USyd gets hit -- we don't. We
also have the UTS Handbook, like I mentioned -- an important place to get information.
So use that religiously. If you don't know what a subject means, or is, read it. And
if you don't know what it means, well, then ask. But we expect you do to your homework
first, because you are adults, you're self-directed, you learn by yourself. I can't teach you to
learn; you have to learn. I can only teach. [Inaudible]. That's the example of a subject
outline. At the top, you'll find it has things like subject details. The most important thing
it's got, as far as you're concerned, is the subject coordinator, and who teaches the subject.
So if you see words like -- who's teaching that one? I can't read it. Oh, is that [inaudible]?
It's a classic example of a font that gets crushed, so whoever's doing IT doing interface
design, you'll learn a lot about how not to do that, okay? That is the contract between
us and you, so it'll tell you exactly what the assessment is, and it'll tell you who
teaches it. What it doesn't usually tell you is your classroom, because it changes before
we print this. So we'll take a lot at something else -- all our subjects, when you to the
UTS timetable -- and I presume you all know how to use the timetable at this stage? Who
hasn't started enrolling yet? You can go like this -- you don't have to embarrass yourself.
Okay -- two people confessed. When you go to UTS, you do the Start UTS; it has, you
actually enrol in subjects. You may notice there are different types of subjects. Most
undergraduate students do what we call standard program. So on the system it'll say S, and
you'll see a usual, a lecture and tutorial every week. There's a few other methods of
teaching as well -- like there's block mode. Postgraduates, a lot of your subjects will
be block mode, which means you have to come in for either a weekend or two days in a row,
so it's great for those who are working. And we do have some distance mode, but most of
you aren't distance students. So keep that in mind -- if you see a D, it's a distance
mode subject. We prefer you to do it locally, but it's still hypothetically possible to
do it remotely, okay? Especially if you're -- who works? Who's working, by the way? Hey,
a large portion of you working. Do you ever get sent overseas or interstate? Nobody! Okay,
you can stay here with me. I used to work and I used to get six months in Sydney only.
Oh, we do have subjects in summer and winter for students who like to do that kind of thing.
I prefer the holidays myself. Okay, so, you're probably not interested hearing
me. I'm just blabbing on about unusual things. I'd like to introduce you to the Associate
Dean of teaching and Learning, Dr Rob Jarman. He's going to lead you through what you do
if you need help. So let's introduce Rob. [Applause]
Speaker 3: Good evening everybody. I'd like start off with a little bit more show and
tell. Could you put your hand up if you're an international student please? Welcome,
welcome to you all. Could you please put your hand back up if you're a short-stay, here
for a semester or two as an international student only? An extra special welcome to
you, so thank you for choosing UTS. So these are students, for the rest of you, that would
be here -- that we're hosting for a semester or two on exchange from all around the country
and these, we have the same program reciprocating for our local students to go and study at
those universities as well through exchange. Can you put your hand up if you're here with
the Science Without Borders from Brazil? Welcome. Yeah, there's a good number of you, so that
you're all away -- the special program that we're very excited to have you here and hosting
you for, and I hope you add a significant amount of colour to our classrooms, so thank
you. Alright, some ah, ah, some words about the
support that we can provide you while you're studying, and this is something that we really
need you to be aware of; we don't want you going through the course -- I was going to
say 'unsupported' -- but not knowing where to turn or who to go and talk to you. So there'll
be administrative support, and the first people we want you to know about that are the student
centres, so if you're having difficulty about enrolling into the subjects, or you're struggling
with some aspect of your enrolment, they're the first port of call. For academic support,
if you've got a question about an assessment task, or something that's going on in the
subject, then you get that outline and you have a look at the subject coordinator for
it and they're the first port of call for that question. Pretty simple. If you require
English language support, we've got a centre here, there's obviously some good tweets going
on, yep. Because you're all looking over there. If you want some English language, and they
clearly do, then we've got a HELPS centre here at the university -- it's a higher education
language support centre, and they will be most useful to you, and you may get referred
there by your academic to say 'Look, your assessment task needs a bit of polish, so
go along there.' And if you need technical support, then generally those subjects that
you're doing that might have laboratory exercises etcetera, or if you want, we'll tell you about
that support during those subjects. Or, if you just want to get your iPad connected so
you can use the free wifi in the place, then we've got technical support to help you out
with that. I've already mentioned this -- so, Building
1 student centre, that's a picture of the front desk there -- that'll be for all of
the engineering students. There's a similar one for all of the IT students to go to in
Building 10, so this is your first port of call and if you're asked to put in an e-request,
or if you've got a question to put in writing, then there's an email address there for you.
Okay. I'm not going to go into too much detail about these, but your study plan defines the
course that you've come into, and the requirements for completing that, and unfortunately it
looks like a big long list of subjects, which might look a bit daunting at the moment, especially
if you've got lots of them to do. Other documents, like the, or other resources like the handbook
or the study guides that we give you will give you a bit of an idea about what the prerequisites
-- so those subjects you have to finish before you go on and do other ones. At university,
if you don't get through a subject -- fail -- then you need to repeat it, and that prerequisite
chain then becomes a little bit important, so you need to make sure if you're doing a
subject and ah, ah, ah, this has prerequisite for lots of other ones, that you knuckle down
and make sure you get through it. Electives are in all of our courses; they
offer you an opportunity to see the horizon or to go and look in other areas of study
which might interest you. You might like to go and do something in the faculty of science
or law or business, or if you're an undergrad, doing some postgrad studies in engineering,
for example. Or, like those hands that were up before, you might want to go and study,
say, thermodynamics in Stuttgart University -- they teach you exactly the same sort of
curriculum that we do; we've got students over there doing all sorts of subjects in
ah, ah, places all around the country. So you can either do a core subject for your
degree, or even electives, so yeah, and you can even do some language stuff while you're
over there. Oh, all the exchange stuff, it's taught in English -- you don't have to learn
German to do the thermodynamics. Can you imagine how hard that would be?
Um, okay. So for credit recognition means those people that have come in with previous
studies -- so if you're a undergrad student and you're coming here with previous studies
at another university, put your hand up. Okay -- I would have expected a few more, so hopefully
by now you're already well on the path to knowing yep, these are the previous studies
I've done and I've got my RPL or credit recognition sorted out. We ask that you complete that
within the first week or two of your first semester. I don't want it dragging around;
get it resolved, get it fixed up early, so that you know what is left on your study plan
to complete. And if you want to do things like changes -- if you start off in, say,
the general major for engineering or you start off in civil and you want to change to civil
construction or change of major type thing, or if you want to do a change of course, then
student centre is your first port of call. They'll tell you how to go about it and what
the requirements are. There's some extra special support, I suppose,
that we can make available for you. So if, for example, you need some special consideration
-- these are things that happened to you which are beyond your control during the semester,
and you need some help, you might be late for an assignment or you might get sick or
whatever, then we've got special consideration. This is a process that we have -- it's centralised
and the student centre can help you out. My tip to you, and there's some information in
your booklet, is to be aware and know what the requirements are for your subject before
something goes wrong, because if you're not well, you don't want to be trying to work
that stuff out. We have special assessment conditions, so you might have English as a
second language coming in -- and many of you will -- coming into an exam, you might need
some extra time, or you might have some other requirements that, that would benefit from
having special conditions for your exam or assessment task, then make us aware of those.
Agan, there's a contact in your book, and student services unit is our one-stop-shop
for all aspects of support for you. So, whether that's with HELPS, that English language stuff,
or being oriented today, so a lot of the people that are in orange t-shirts who are all coming
to you from, or are all volunteers through student services, or peer networks or if you
need a doctor, my doctor's actually a UTS person here, which is pretty handy. Um, if
you need some guidance about employment etcetera, it's a one-stop-shop for all of that stuff.
I don't know what I'm pointing at the TV; it's just a habit, isn't it, to change channel?
I've mentioned before about IT assistance -- get your mobile device connected; go and
see IT support. We have faculty, internal faculty, you know, you'd expect an engineering
and IT faculty to be huge in the area of technology. We are -- we've got our, we've got support
people for the laboratories that we run, and we've got a contact for those places when
needed. And the majority of your subjects, all of that will be provided through the subject,
seamlessly. Um, we've got some other internal ah, ah contacts
that you might be aware of. So if you've come in as an international student, most likely,
whether it's a short stay or you're here for a full award, you've come through the international
office and Melissa's area with your application, so that's, I guess, something to be aware
of, and they may be assistance. Your real first people that you should be talking to
should be international office, the UTS one. If they suggest that you need some faculty-specific
advice, then they're good people to come and talk to.
We have an industry partnering unit to help those students out that are doing the diploma
courses, either in engineering practice or IT professional practice, so we've got a whole
group there that liaises with our industry partners to help you secure an internship.
We don't issue you jobs; you compete for them with everybody else -- and these are the undergraduate
programs. In learning and design centres, these are
-- and we'll have a new one in our new building. These are drop-in centres where staff will
be, and they'll tell you when they're available there for consultations -- and they're a handy
place for you to find out further information. They might use that as a single stop for you
to get further information like a subject folder -- they might leave you handouts to
collect or assignments, and we've also got a Women in Engineering unit, which Hung has
already mentioned to you. So there's some contact details in your booklet as well.
I think I've already mentioned, if you've got a problem, start at the bottom and work
your way up. There's some rule breakers on the stage; hopefully all of your problems
or your queries are resolved at the lowest level, so whether that's the tutor, the lecturer
or the subject coordinator; if it needs to go on beyond that, then there are other people,
like the course coordinator, and you'll normally be directed to those people. Those are all
listed in your books; I'll tell you how you contact them: it's usually always via email.
Your UTS email will remain your ah, ah official means of contact between staff at the university,
or you know, through the Ask program, so please use your UTS email. Don't use your Hotmail
or whatever other email you've got; we sometimes find that the filters take them out, and we
can't get necessarily a response to you. The other thing is we don't know it's you. It
might look like you, it might, and read like you; it might even have your student number
in there. But if it's your UTS, and we want to provide information back to you that's
important or critical to you, we want to make sure it's you we're doing that to, for.
Um, okay. Couple of key dates -- these are a bit non-negotiable, I'm afraid. We're bound
by government regulations etcetera, so these are a bit immovable. We hit these dates and
we go past them and we want to make sure everyone is locked in. So, Friday the 7th of March,
which is the Friday of the second week of semester -- that's your last date to get any
subjects added to your study plan, and get matters resolved. So if you've been working
out about recognition of prior learning, or credit recognition, have all this stuff sorted
out long before, you know, the Friday of the week 2, because that's the deadline to add
a subject. The last date to withdraw -- if you've been doing some subjects and you're
not too sure, you're saying 'Maybe I need to drop a subject; I'm not comfortable about
doing, say, four subjects for this semester and I think I need to reduce a load' -- have
a chat with an academic advisor and your last date to withdraw without academic and without
financial penalty, is what we call the Census date, which is the 31st of March.
I've already mentioned about email, and the only other one that I'll add in here is UTS
Online. That's a generic platform that we use for disseminating information to, you
know, classes that might be up to 4, 450 students. So we have one place that you can dial into,
get all the resources for that, or allow the academic to make announcements to you, and
in that case, you're actually enrolled into those subjects, that stuff will appear on
your UTS Online, and then at the end of that semester when you've got through all those
subjects, other ones will come up magically for the following semester. So it automatically
updates. And Chris has already mentioned the dedicated site we have, I think.
Um, okay. A couple of other slides. So if you're um, ah, this is a picture to be aware
that the campus is a little bit big. If you've got ah, ah, some stuff down in, say, Blackfriars
Campus, which is another 200 metres-odd down that way, and you've suddenly got to be over
the other side of the campus, it's not a two-minute walk. I think, I just want to make sure you're
aware that you're going to need to allow a little bit of time between getting one place
and another. So, you know, the people in orange t-shirts are going to be all around the place
for the first couple of weeks; make use of them, run up to them and say 'Oh my gosh,
I've got to be in CB06.06.123!' Well, they'll help find Building 6, Level 6, Room 123 for
you, okay? If you require access to particular laboratories,
then we have pin codes for those; for the early stage subjects, the majority of those,
you're going to be accessing them during normal or scheduled laboratory times. For some of
the computer labs, you might have to have a pin code, and for that there's a website
we want you to go to to register for that, so that you've got your, what is it, six-digit
pin. You need to carry your ID on you -- if you're here after hours, security might ask
you for it, so keep it handy. And if you lose it, make sure you go to student centre and
say 'I've lost my card -- I need to get a replacement.' You need a student card before
you go into a formal, centrally conducted exam here, so make sure you keep one of them.
Um, okay. Um, one of the, this is a quick screen shot of what a UTS Online looks like,
and I've already mentioned what my courses look like -- they're down the right-hand side.
Right at the bottom there'll be a link to what we call our safety induction. This is,
you need to pass the safety induction quiz, which is a little bit of reading and then
a couple of really simple questions, so that we know that you know you're going to be safe
when you're in those facilities. So this is something you need to go and do over the first
couple of weeks so that your pin will work in the spaces where we want them to. And we
ask you to do that every year, that little refresher. And I think ... oh. Okay.
Some general advice. I want you to be developing your professional identity. I want you to
start thinking of yourself as not an engineering student, but a student engineer, for example.
It works better than the IT one. So I want you to start thinking, those that are undergrads,
I want you to start thinking about that now, and saying 'What do I have to do in order
to become a graduate engineer, employable in the workplace?' I don't want you to go
through the course and say 'I've passed all these subjects, and now what am I going to
be doing?' I want you to start thinking about that from day one, and we're going to help
you with that, with a whole lot of subject outlines and courses that you'll do that will
be targeting graduate attributes -- that'll be one thing that we help you with. You'll
be looking at those and saying, 'Why do I need to focus on these communication skills,
or problem-solving skills, or these aspects?' So these are things that we're going to highlight
to you in the subject outline, and you're going to say 'Right, I get it now -- when
I'm doing this introduction to electrical engineering, we're targeting these specific
things in my development as a professional.' You'll hear things like Learning 2014; this
is a program that we have within the university-wide, to change our approach to our teaching, but
predominantly it's a change to a focus on learning. You're learning, like Crispy said
before. I mentioned, make sure you know what to do
before it goes wrong. That's smart. If you get a change, if you have a chat to one of
us and we say 'That sounds reasonable -- send me an email', then do that. Send an email
to the person and say 'You said you'd say yes to this' and then wait for the email that
comes back that says yes. Don't listen to your friend when they say 'Yeah, you can have
an extra two weeks to do that assignment.' You say 'Show me where it says in writing
that I can get that two-week extra time', okay? Don't just hope.
Yes, we create the learning environments -- you'd already be well and truly aware of that, and
that's something that we strive to improve for you. University should be a fun place,
it should be an enjoyable experience, it should be something that you, you know, you participate
and engage in. We want you here on the campus -- we want you to be enjoying those other
activities that are on out there, not just focused on doing lots and lots of classwork
activities. Be resilient; make sure you've got a strategy to get yourself out of jail
if something goes wrong. You like to think that the place is nice and linear, and you'll
go through without any problems whatsoever, but life will happen. And for example, we're
all moving to a new building sometime during the next few months, so there will be some
change, not just for you but for all of us, and we're a lot older and probably a lot crankier
when it comes to moving. Um, take the opportunities that are available,
like through scholarships, through volunteering, going on a BUiLD program, going on an exchange
program -- you'll have lots of chances to be in competitions -- these are all, a lot
of these extracurricular things add a lot of colour and a lot of networking opportunities
for you to find out, look really good on a CV for a future employer. You didn't just
get good passes and did really well; you actually did all this other stuff. We're here to help,
the university's a big place -- make sure you're sort of ready for it.
Um, we have certain expectations for what's required for getting through the subjects.
If you've studied it at another location, you've probably got another set of standards
to at least come up to speed with. So be aware of those. Um, a classic one of these is plagiarism.
You know, it's not tolerated at UTS. If you're identified, then we will take action against
you, so in other places, it might be a reasonable thing, or they might have small amounts which
is okay; it's zero tolerance here. So if you're identified, we pursue that, and that's one
of those academic environment or cultural things which is sometimes a bit different
to where you might have studied before. We want you to ah, um, ah, make sure you've
got that work/life balance between what your commitments are here as well as what life
is going to happen to you outside, and you know, it wasn't so long ago that the average
Australian university student was studying full-time, was working 17 hours a week part-time.
I don't know how you do it. You know? We think that if you're studying full-time, that's
about a full-time load -- 35, 36 hours a week of study. To find extra time on top of that
is tough. And ensure that you're being a bit strategic about your course; don't just think
of it as jumping through hoops and saying 'Yes, I've passed those years'. Start thinking
about that professional development, start thinking about what opportunities can I see
-- where am I going to target my second internship so that I can land that job, and what do I
have to do in my first internship to get me to that point?