Milestone Workshop by Prof Sue McKemmish + Pecha Kucha (Presentation of local HDR students' projects)

In conjunction with Prof Sue's visit to Sunway campus, we had a chance to be briefed on the PhD milestone, and to meet up with Ms Cassandra the Graduate Student Services manager. The workshop is pretty much self-explanatory based on the following diagram. Some questions were raised regarding the courses (FIT5144 & FIT6021) compulsory to the students, and how would the timeline be affected with the inclusion of these courses. We were told that an extra period of 3 months is eligible for those taking the courses - if extension is needed. This has made most of us relief as the works from those courses have taken up quite some significant time out of our research activities.

In another session named as Pecha Kucha (a presentation style based on 20 slides per 20 seconds) was the students' presentation of their research projects. Each of the students was given 20 seconds to present the current stage of their research to the audience, which was inclusive of most of the HDR students, some lecturers from the school as well as the Deputy Head of School, Prof Sue herself, and Ms Cassandra. Based on my presentation, I received an important feedback from Prof Sue, in which she suggested I could consider to include my end-user (the Blind and Low Vision) along the prototype development phases. The point was taken and now it has formed part of my research methods. I appreciate the session.

Overall, the meeting and the workshop has offered us a platform to know more about some policies and procedures important to our PhD milestone.