Go to a Graduation!

Graduations are great! I think all of us need to get to a graduation once in a while (at least once a year). They really are fantastic events and provide a great opportunity to see the importance of our work. In our Division we get to see our students before they start at the university during the

 marketing process. Our international student support section gets to see students when they have problems (or when they are the problem!) and our alumni

 section when they have been out in the world. But graduation is the only point where we get t

o see the climax of the student’s and our hard work.

 

There is nothing better than seeing the pride on the faces of the student’s family and

 friends. Many of our students are the first member of their family to attend university. Universities are mysterious places for the

 family. The mystic of universities is enhanced at graduation when we put on our show of tradition and pageantry. Just

 think what all of this must look like from the outside from the viewpoint of someone who ha

s never stepped inside a university.

 

I think that all of us attending graduations get a real sense of pride – to see what our students have achieved.

 

I the past couple of weeks I have had the privilege to take

 part in two graduations one in Singapore and the other at Guangzhou. I enjoyed both of them immensely. For me the two best parts of graduation are seeing students cross the stage to pick up their degree and the other is at the end of the ceremony meeting families. In China this is particularly good. The whole family wants pictures with you (as you can see from this one!).

 

So when you feel down about the daily grind – go to a graduation you will see that your work is important and that you are making a difference.

 

Staff from the Division are more than welcome to attend any graduation at JCU. We will start publishing the dates of the ceremonies – so come along!

Shanghai

Today is my third and final day in Shanghai. This afternoon I catch a flight to Singapore. An overnight flight from KL got me here on Monday at about 7am. I had a full day of meetings on Monday. I never sleep well on planes so getting through the day was a little difficult! However I have always found that the best way to get over jet lag is to immediately fit into the time zone you are in. So if you arrive at 7am it is best to struggle through until 9 or 10 pm. If you sleep during the day you take days to get over jet lag.

I met up with Ben Kelly who is the Manager of our Shanghai Office. Ben works with Eva the office administrator to look after JCU's interests in China. He spends a lot of time servicing agents and recruiting students. Ben gave me a briefing of what we have been doing in China. We also reviewed targets for China.

Later that day I visited Mr Bei Qiang the Director of Tongji Study abroad. This group wants to work with JCU to establish a pre-masters program for our Business School. I will be talking to that school about this when I get back.

I then visited one of our agents Edu Shanghai agency. I met with the Managing Director Li Weiping and Senior Consultant Vera Feng. This was a good meeting and we discussed many of our programs. Mr Li had visited our Townsville campus earlier this year.

After having dinner with Ben I got to bed at about 9.30 - not bad - no jet lag for me.

The following day (Tuesday) I went to Shanghai Ocean University. This is university very like our own (research intensive and very well respected in the field of marine biology). Professor Cocklin had visited the university earlier this year. We are looking at setting up an on going relationship with SOU in the near future. Professor Jun Ye told me about the university and what he would like to see happen between our two universities. I also met with Professor Zhong Junsheng, and Professor Cheng Yongxu. Yvonne Wang from the Foreign Affairs Office also attended the meeting. The university hosted a lunch where we ate most of the marine life we had been talking about during our meeting! This will be a university that we will work with very closely in the future.

After lunch I visited Fudan University. This is one of China's leading universities. Ben Kelly and I met up with the Dean of nursing Jia Hongli and Vice Dean Xia Haiou. At this meeting we discussed nursing in both China and Australia. There are possible links between this school and our own school of nursing. On my return I will be talking to our new head of nursing David to discuss a possible relationship.

In the evening I had dinner with Dr David Mcquire. David used to be CEO of Advance Cairns. He is now General Manger of the Shanghai Daily - the largest English language paper in China. It was good to get David's take on what is happening in China post Olympics.

Today I have a meeting at the Queensland Education Office in Shanghai and then I am off to the airport once again.

The importance of Alumni networks

Alumni of the university are very important partners of the University. These are the people that know the university even better than we the staff. They have experienced what JCU has to offer and know the value of having a JCU degree.

We have just undertaken some bench marking of international students at JCU and this has found that our graduates on the whole have a very satisfactory experience of studying at JCU. I am confident that domestic students would also have an equally positive experience. So we have nothing to fear from these people "telling it as it is".

I think that one of the problems that we have had in the past is that we have not really defined what we want the JCU Alumni groups to do and what their purpose is. Last evening I met with the JCU Malaysian group. This group is led by its President Prame Kumar Nair. You can see this group in the picture.

We discussed the issue of the purpose of Alumni groups. We came to the conclusion that staff and alumni have exactly the same objective - to make JCU the best it can possibly be. Both staff and alumni have a self interest in promoting the university. Alumni want to to able to say to potential employees that they have graduated from a well known and well respected university and we want to say that we work in one!

So rather than simply seeing alumni groups as social groupings we need to look at what Alumni can do for the university. They can of course raise the profile of the university and help to recruit students. They can also form links with leaders in the community who can help us to pursue our aspirations. This is particularly important for Alumni groups like the Malaysian Alumni group which is based in the tropics. They are very important in helping us achieve "a brighter future for life in the tropics world wide".

We have to support our Alumni. We need to be very clear about how we can help them with reaching our common goals. We need to offer appropriate training and support. The Engagement Office will be training our Alumni in fund raising and engagement practices. We will ensure that visiting academics offer to present to these groups.

We have to see Alumni as just as much part of JCU as staff and students. We have a long way to go with our alumni relations - but it is a very worthwhile area of activity.

The social aspect of Alumni groups is important. Graduates like having a forum for discussing old times when they were studying. In Malaysia the Alumni groups have go-carting evenings, bush dances and talent nights. It is however a responsibility of the University to give some leadership to these groups - or the social side can become the only purpose for these groups meeting. This is a shame because they have so much more to offer.

I hope that everyone in the Division will be able to come up with some ideas of how we can work with Alumni in the future.

Greetings from Kuala Lumpur

So my first real post comes to you from Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. This two week trip will take me from KL to Shanghai to Singapore to Guangzhou to the UK to Brussels. I will post as much as I can about these places and what my objectives are as I go along.

I am in KL mainly to do some work for the engagement office of the Division. I am here with the Director Linda Griffith who has been doing some great work in this part of the world. We are seeking to make contacts in Malaysia that can contribute to JCU's strategic intent - A Brighter Future for Life in the Tropics Worldwide".

We have a Malaysian Alumni group that meets in KL. We are looking to see how we can contribute to this group - and how it can help us.

Yesterday (Friday) I met with Gavin Gomez at the Australian High Commission. Gavin is the Deputy Director for Australian Education International. Linda had already met with Adam Carlon the Director when she was last in KL. Gavin gave us a briefing on the higher education scene in Malaysia and gave us some leads regarding universities we should be making links with.

Professor Ian Wronski has recently been to KL and made on the spot offers to our medical school. Ian also met with AEI. AEI reported that this had been a very successful visit. Ian also met with our alumni group - which is what I will be doing later today. We have been successful in obtaining scholarships for our programs from the Malaysian Government.

We also met with Puan Sr Datin Seri Dr Susan Cheah. Dr Cheah is an executive member of the Sunway Group. She is also the president of The Malaysian Australian Alumni Committee. We had a very good meeting and she is going to help us to grow our alumni activities in Malaysia. She is also going to help us arrange the program for when our VC visits Malaysia later this year. This picture show Dr Cheah at her meeting with us. I look a little fuzzy in this picture - maybe because I had been up all night flying from Australia to Malaysia!

In between these meetings and on the trip over I have been in almost constant contact with Jodie about our Divisional Plan. This had to be in submitted on Friday - and we did it on time! I would like to thank the Directors for all the hard work that they have put into this plan. I also want to thank Jodie for the work she has done. I was on the phone to her at mid-night on Thursday talking about the plan - now that is dedication. I am meeting with the VC next Thursday to discuss and agree our plan. I will let you know the outcome of that meeting.

So the blog starts

One of the results of the recent staff climate survey was that staff in the Division of International and Engagement at James Cook University ( http://www.jcu.edu.au/) wanted to hear more about what was going on across the division and in particular what the Deputy Vice Chancellor was getting up to!

I ran a pilot of a blog site on a trip to South American earlier this year. This proved to be very successful. So now I have started this blog. In it I hope to highlight some of the great stuff we are doing across the Division and the University. I also hope that people from within the Division will post comments and say how they feel about how things are going.

So lets get going!