One year and counting...

One year has passed, since I came onboard the campus of APU as a full-time staff. APU is the 6th company I joined, the 5th university in total. I pledged that this will be the last university I would join, because I look forward to early retirement. As how I would have written in the past, I would count my blessings and achievements as my own reflection.

What have I accomplished in this first year? In terms of teaching, I have taught 6 modules: 3 under Bachelor degree, and 3 for postgraduate studies. My main module seems to be Research Methods for Computing and Technology (RMCT), in which I have taught 4 batches of students, with a total of 280 students from Cybersecurity programs and 340 students from Software Engineering programs. For this module alone, the assessments are individual basis, separated into 2 assignment reports and 1 presentation to be assessed on each student. As for the other 5 modules, let them be a mystery for now.

Apart from teaching, assessing assignments, moderating results, preparing learning materials and mentoring interns, supervising resrarch projects is another task in hand. As Main Supervisor, I have graduated 1 Master student, who has now returned to her country, Bhutan, to resume serving her university as lecturer. I am now supervising 4 Master students who are in the final stage of their research studies. I have another 4 Master students from other programs, still at proposal stage. Apart from Bhutan, my supervisees are from Malaysia, South Korea, and China. I am sure there are more to come, since I will be teaching the next batch of Research Methodology in Computing and Engineering (RMCE) for postgraduate level.

I am blessed to be assigned as PhD Main Supervisor to 3 PhD candidates, 1 from Malaysia and 2 from Libya. I remember agreeing to accept other PhD candidates, but these are the 3 I have so far. They are undertaking PhD in Technology at APU. Nevertheless, I am still closely supervising a PhD candidate in UniKL, whom I hope will complete her study soon.

It is a blessing to receive invitations as External Examiner for PhD viva voce. I had a privilege of assessing and graduating 3 PhD candidates from 2 other universities since I joined APU. Thank you to City University and UniKL for the opportunity and recognition.

Publication! As one serving the academic world, it is a must to publish research papers to retain the position and be deemed successful. I agree I have not pushed myself to the boundary yet, but I am happy that I have published 11 research papers, in which 9 of them are indexed by Scopus. In doing so, I have traveled to Taiwan, where I met other great researchers within my field, Knowledge Management. There are more to come.

As a person who love sharing knowledge and gaining new experience, I daresay that I have mustered up my courage to be part of the industry voluntarily, as I was appointed as Technical Advisor to Goolee Sdn Bhd. Thanks to Goolee, I have gained more confidence in providing consultancy to their technical team in various projects they are working on. Goolee has brought me to places I never thought I could be, such as the recent Tokyo Game Show 2024 on Japan. Apart from this company, I had a privilege to connect Goolee with Farbeat Technologies Sdn Bhd, in which future collaboration between them is in the pipeline.

You may ask "What's next?" and my answer is, more quality research papers, perhaps a book, and graduating PhD students. I do have more ideas for events, networking and student mentoring, but let's just wait and see what I will report?after?a?year.