First of all, I want to thank you Prof Rose Alinda for her time in giving a fruitful and insightful talk on Soul of Academia in Higher Education (AEA102) which was held online on 29th September 2021 (Sunday). This course is beneficial for young or new lecturers like me because before this I didn’t know much about this matter. Throughout this course, I learned a lot about how to nurture a more holistic soul of academia, the purpose of it, and understand what can I do to acculturate the soul of academia for my career.
There are a lot of activities throughout the course which I think were really good for engaging with the audience. One of the activities was to reflect on how did I get into academia. This activity was simple but give a quite significant impact on me. During my degree, I’m still have not decided on any specific career that I want to go after my degree. I do small businesses during my studies such as selling T-shirts that I design, foods, and freelance photographer. I do believe that I have that entrepreneurship trait in me. To make it short, I was offered “Skim Latihan Akademik Muda (SLAM)” during my final semester for my degree. I take a good long thought and opinion from family and friends about it, on whether I should accept it or not. After considering all opinions, I’ve decided to take that offer as a challenge for me because I know that it is not easy to do a fast-track PhD with a contract that I have to obey. I’m telling you this because before this my soul toward academia is kind of missing and not so strong. After joining this course, it helps me to understand and motivated me to become great academia with a good soul. I know it is not easy but after hearing your talk and sharing, I believe I can do it.
Besides, the case studies activity was also a very good session because from that we can see there are various personalities of individuals. In an organization like UTM which have thousands of staff, we have to be wise in dealing with others. There are many traits and behavior that we had discussed in this session which was good for early exposure for us. One take-home message that I can get from this activity is I have to be just, patient, ethical, compassionate, responsible, kind, respectful, etc. at all times. Furthermore, the approach taken by UTM on Key Amal Indicator (KAI) I think is a good initiative because it can help the academic staff to have a good soul of academia for those who really understand and appreciate the intentions of KAI. All in all, this course is a really good course for all academic staff, doesn’t matter new or old staff because we have to keep reminding each other about the importance of the soul of academia in order to be constantly motivated and strive for greater success for UTM.