Student Award and Testimonials
Falonnie Chin Pei Lin, final year Finance, Accounting and Management student receiving her Vice Chancellor's Global Graduate Prize for the year 2017/18 from Professor Shearer West, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Nottingham during the award presentation at the UK campus.
Muhammad Adamsyah Avicenna Pasaribu
BA (Hons) English with Creative Writing
As an international student from Indonesia, I cannot express just how much that I enjoyed taking the NAA programme outside of my main Creative Writing studies, especially since I was able to really commit to both. From my experience, it really helped me understand exactly what would be expected from me as a future employee once I entered the working world after college, thanks to the guidance I had from my great lecturers and their guest speakers from class. All 3 of the modules that I took during my programme gave me such an invaluable experience in allowing me to try new things, as a way to help increase my employability for when I’m finished.
Because of Mata Pelajaran Umum(MPU), I was only able to join later in Year 2 after finishing them and being given my personal tutor’s blessing to follow it. The first module was “Reflecting Upon Work Experience,” which taught me how to structure my CV better and improve the wording for my education and experience sections, especially after I returned home to Jakarta and finished a 3-month internship for it, my longest one yet, in fact, which helped increase my understanding of certain media industries in Indonesia, especially if it’s an available career path that I wish to follow upon graduating. The second module was “The Art of Public Speaking,” where although I’m already confident enough to speak publicly during a class presentation, I learned about a lot of techniques that I can apply to specific social scenarios, including speeches and interviews, where I had to apply what I learned in class to exercises in breakout rooms, such as applying the STAR method when asked about past work experience during a job interview, which made me realise that I should and want to learn more about different methods in public speaking and start practising them, which would definitely benefit from my self-confidence in doing so.
The third module was “Optimising your LinkedIn Profile for Job Search Success,” which correlates more to my first module, especially since it involved creating an account on the platform LinkedIn for the purpose of building a business network from it. As someone who is absent on social media, learning how to use a new platform was a bit difficult and confusing at first, but the more I learned about making connections through posting content and reacting to other people’s activities by liking and commenting on them, not just from updating the education and experience sections on my profile before sending invitations to connect, I then realised its potential and benefits. So, I began posting more on my profile to keep it active, which helps me stay in touch with several companies and organisations that I’m interested to join, especially since I might be checking their job postings more frequently so that I can find the right opportunity to work at any of them after finishing college.
I’m very grateful to have had the opportunity to join these courses, especially as an international student, and I’m very glad that I decided to take these as my extracurriculars. All the more reason to when I want to make the most out of my time here, at the University of Nottingham Malaysia. For any future juniors here reading this, go join! I promise that you’ll even have some of the best moments in your life going through it!