M. M. Ibrahim

University-industry collaboration through industrial training program

As the first university to adopt the practice and application oriented education approach, all students in Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka (UTeM) are required to undertake Industrial Training (IT) in order to fulfill the diploma and bachelor degree requirements. This is to expose the students to the real working environment from the early stage of their professional development. Apart of it, is the university-industry partnership that provides and delivers high quality of technical and engineering education. This paper is about a research conducted on students that undertake 20 weeks IT for 2007/2008 academic session. The respondents are 245 students from the Faculty of Electronic and Computer Engineering (FKEKK) that have completed their IT either in public or private sector. Industries and students feedbacks are gathered and analyzed in order to study the impact of IT towards the students, university and industry. In addition, the data are analyzed to confirm whether the IT program is helping a good university-industry relationship and the possibility of university to collaborate with the industry. The results obtained will be used to improve the university-industry management in the future.

Tendency of women in engineering program offerred by UTeM

In past, engineering education is dominated by male society. Furthermore, nature of discipline, perception of society and knowledge of women in engineering is also limited among them. Previously, most women only chose courses that somehow related and perceived by community as suit to them. Nowadays, the history is gradually changed; engineering can also be learned and conquered by women. Women are also accepted and rewarded for their contribution. In Malaysia, this kind of change took place around the end of 1990s when the government announced the Seventh Malaysia Plan (RMK 7); which stresses on the need of additional human power in science and technology. With the urge, women realized that they should rise to the expectation and immersed themselves in this area; which promises more work opportunity in the future. This paper aims to investigate the tendency of women in choosing engineering courses while pursuing their study in Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka (UTeM). The analysis has been done based on the number of female students during enrolment and total of female graduates on the 1st until 4th UTeM convocation (year 2005 until 2008). Women perception and acceptance towards engineering courses can be seen from the result of the analysis. With that, the causes of those changes will be presented and elaborated for further educational purposes improvement.