(Title quoting Al Quran, An-Najm (53), verse 28)
UiTM's 70th Convocation, 26 Mei-3 Jun 09
Research is a special endeavor pursued by many, especially academicians and of course researchers. There are many facets of research motivations and one of the major factors is to find the ‘truth’. But, for those with a short term goal of getting a postgraduate degree, MSc or PhD, indulging in research toward advancing knowledge is minimally sufficient!
As a postgraduate student, a good and significant research is central to a PhD. There are certain traits that characterizes a 'good' PhD. There is a saying 'what is important is the journey, not the destination', and this is really true in pursuing an adequate and substantial PhD. The journey towards the final destination (PhD) is actually an embodiment of practice, focus, discipline, perseverance, commitment, diligent, passion and patient. At the end of a successful PhD, a ‘new’ knowledge will be established. Prior to that, this ‘new’ knowledge is not in existence. This fact defines the ‘difficulty’ in pursuing a PhD and it boils down to the question of ‘how can one establish certain ‘experiment’ to accomplish the ‘new’ knowledge?! In many instances, PhD students were frustrated, beleaguered, de-motivated and some even may gave up, when and after they discussed their PhD work with colleagues and also experts. This is due to negative remarks, or misunderstanding (of the researcher), especially about the ‘impossibilities’ of the research. Some of the common comments are: ‘this is not done before’, ‘nobody has done it this way’, ‘there is no such study before’, etc. On the contrary, these comments should be considered as good motivations as they indicate that the proposal has a high potential to hit ‘new’ knowledge’ and there are gaps in the current knowledge domain!
It should be realized that, when starting out, usually, the only (two) persons who knew the details of a proposed PhD research were its researcher and supervisor; others may be playing guessing games as to the possibility and extent of the proposal. They should be the ones that have a ‘strong’ believe that their proposed research will be generating new knowledge. Other peoples’ comments and ideas should be weight out appropriately before being used to influence the research.
For this year, so far five ASPRG group members had successfully completed their research and defended their thesis. These are:
Dr Herlina Abdul Rahim (
Thesis - Nonlinear Identification for Dengue Fever),
Dr Mohd Hezri Fazalul Rahiman (
System Identification of Steam Distillation Essential Oil Extraction System),
Joon Ibrahim (
Application of Fuzzy Logic Control into Power System Stabilizers for Peninsular Malaysia’s National Grid System Stability Enhancement),
Normaizira Hamidi (
Characterization of Drug Delivery System Using Visible Spectrophotometry And Artificial Neural Network), and
Mohd Azri Bin Abdul Aziz (
The Development of a Modified Particle Swarm Optimization Technique in Solving Class Scheduling Problems)
Congratulations to them!
Dr Herlina receiving her PhD scroll (The Star 6 Jun 09)
