Preparing to meet new Bachelor of Design students tomorrow

The faculty has set tomorrow (Monday, 2 Sep 2013) as the date to meet new students. I look forward to meet them, and hopefully the quality of students we get this time would be good and fit for the programme. It was quite annoying to me to see students who make their choice of Bachelor of Design programme as 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th or worse, not as a choice at all.

Having said so, I wasn't sure myself whether to continue studying multimedia back then in 1999. After one semester of study the Creative Multimedia programme, I felt like moving to IT or Management programme--anything but not Multimedia! I couldn't forget the culture shock I had, shifting from Science stream to Art stream, learning to hold pencil in order to draw properly. I felt like being treated as a naive child...

I took the courage to meet my lecturer, Mr Abdul Halim to discuss about my change of programme.

Mr Abdul Halim, my lecturer in MMU. 

After telling him my intention to change programme, he said the following:

"Tan, I see sparkling in your eyes! Your design work was average but you have good attitude in learning."

Because of his encouragement, I stayed on studying creative multimedia, and then further study at Master's and PhD level. Eventually, I become a lecturer who teaches creative multimedia like him.

Many students intend to join UPSI because they thought this decision would lead them to become school teachers. This is still somewhat true but for those who are taking Bachelor of Design programmes, they will not become school teacher upon graduation. One profession that is similar to teaching is training, in which graduates of the Bachelor of Design programme may become in-house trainers--design-related or software-related.

Because of this, I insist to include a lecture on "Being Professional Design" in this course, so the students have to chance to explore and discuss about how they want to be professional designers.