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NEWSLETTER CURRENT ISSUE----

The newsletter is regularly distributed by email to all enrolled postgraduate students.

Articles from postgraduate students are welcome - please contact the NUPSA office for further details.

MAY 2012
Brought to you by NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY POSTGRADUATE STUDENTS' ASSOCIATION (NUPSA)

Items in the Newsletter –
1. Upcoming Event
• Ourimbah BBQ
2. Upcoming Workshops
• Procrastination
3. Dean of Students – a Short Profile
4. Recent Media Releases Concerning Postgraduate Students
• Postgraduate Study Experience
• MyUni Website
• Mature Aged Students
5. How to contact NUPSA

1. UPCOMING EVENT
OURIMBAH BBQ
Ourimbah Postgraduate and Honours students are invited to join us for a free lunch:
Date – Friday May 18, 2012
Time - 1.00pm Lunch
Venue – Under The Sails

If you will be attending the event you are asked to contact the NUPSA office nupsa@newcastle.edu.au so your name can be included on the attendance list - this will help with the catering arrangements. Please let the office know by Wednesday May 16.

The lunch will be a light lunch with catering for vegetarian guests provided.

2. UPCOMING WORKSHOPS
NUPSA and Counselling will be holding the following workshop for postgraduate students.

Procrastination
Workshop: Procrastination and Skills to Overcome It
Date: Wednesday May 30 2012
Time: 10-12:30
Room: The Hunter Meeting Room (HA158), Hunter Building, Callaghan Campus
Facilitator: Teresa Dluzewska, Senior Counsellor, University Counselling Service.
RSVP: May 28 2012 nupsa@newcastle.edu.au
Cost: Free

Numbers for all workshops will be limited, so you are asked to email the NUPSA office (nupsa@newcastle.edu.au) if you will be attending any workshop.

Light refreshments will be provided at the above workshops.
For more details of upcoming workshops go to:
http://www.newcastle.edu.au/students/research-higher-degree/current-students/skills-training.html

3. DEAN OF STUDENTS – A SHORT PROFILE
Meet the Dean of Students on paper!
Dr Jennifer Allen began her term as Dean of Students at the beginning of 2012. Jennifer lectures and researches in the area of the social sciences and has a particular interest in equity and social and emotional wellbeing. Jennifer has already been in contact with NUPSA and expressed her willingness to support students. In the role of Dean of Students Jennifer will seek to ensure that all students receive fair and equitable treatment at the University of Newcastle across all courses and campuses. Her specific responsibility is to help students resolve problems of an academic nature. This involves: providing information and advice (often about policies and procedures); assisting communication between students and the academic community; referral to the relevant staff; and direct assistance in negotiating difficult situations as an intermediary if required. If at any time you do need to contact Jennifer please phone 49217778 or email the dean-of-students@newcastle.edu.au

4. RECENT MEDIA RELEASES CONCERNING POSTGRADUATE STUDENTS

• POSTGRADAUATE STUDY EXPERIENCE

POOR supervision of postgraduate students is the leading cause of attrition and loss of potential academics, according to a new report.

"If you have to single out one issue, it would probably be supervision that is the most important for attrition," said Chamonix Terblanche, president of the Australian Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations.

Ms Terblanche recently addressed a conference on quality in postgraduate research in Adelaide and drew on material in an unpublished report commissioned from CAPA by the Innovation Department. It is based on responses to an online survey from 1166 higher research degree candidates of their experiences at Australian universities.

The survey showed it was important candidates felt their research was valued and that they were also respected personally.

"The average age of PhD students is 35 years, so most probably had quite extensive work experience previously," said Ms Terblanche, who is working on her PhD at Curtin University.

"They expect to be treated as a colleague, not merely a rookie. They want to feel respected and feel they are providing value, it helps them persevere.

The survey found students undertaking research training in smaller departments or at regional universities were more likely to have happier relationships with their peers and academics. "But the crunch comes when there are issues -- then it's harder to find support because the group is so small," Ms Terblanche said.

The conference comes as the department considers responses to its paper on defining quality in research training, the first stage of consultation with the sector in reviewing the research training scheme. A second paper will focus on the technical aspects of the RTS, including how the universities' ratings in the Excellence in Research for Australia audit could form part of the funding formula.

Unease has emerged in sector responses. ERA assigns ratings of a university's research performance across subject areas on a scale of one to five, where five is "well above world standard".

But some well-respected groups have challenged its relevance in the review of the training scheme.

The Australian Council of Deans and Directors of Graduate Research argues the retrospective nature of ERA does not provide evidence of the quality of research training environments.

Nigel Palmer, research fellow at the University of Melbourne's Centre for the Study of Higher Education, said measuring process was "tricky".

"For example, does an institution have in place a means of tracking supervisory arrangements of a particular student?

"That to me seems like a basic requirement for institutions and it's not something that can be measured by input and output indicators."

• MY UNI WEBSITE

The federal government has missed the chance to capture prospective postgraduate research students through its new MyUniversity website, says the Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations (CAPA).

CAPA president Chamonix Terblanche said crucial data that influenced postgraduate students' university choice was desperately missing, especially an inventory of supervisors who specialised in specific research areas.

"You usually choose a supervisor before you choose a university, and I was hoping the MyUniversity website would put that all together in a really easy, searchable fashion," said Terblanche, who is undertaking interdisciplinary research on business and information systems at Curtin University.

"But you have to go to each university's website and try and find out where they have embedded that information and then try to make out for yourself if they are experts. It lands in the too hard basket and we'll end up losing a lot of people who could potentially be really good researchers."
She said applying for a PhD was already drawn out and difficult. MyUniversity did nothing to unlock the process, especially for international students, who were less familiar with Australian higher education.

MyUniversity provides previously published data collected by government from universities. But Terblanche said the data, including enrolment figures for masters and PhD programs, was unhelpful. "My decision is influenced by whether they have appropriate supervisors and appropriate facilities, and none of that information is on that website," she said.

Further, searches on Australian Postgraduate Awards and International Postgraduate Research Scholarships - which do influence student decisions - often returned an erroneous "not applicable" message, said Terblanche.

Nigel Palmer, research fellow at the Centre for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Melbourne, agreed the website's postgraduate section was the most poorly developed. He said it could repel rather than attract students.

"Currently, it's offering an indication of scale which is at best 'buggy' and at worst, misleading; it's not misreporting the data but it's unreliable for these purposes," Palmer said.

He said the federal government's Research Workforce Strategy had clearly identified the type of information that had to be conveyed to encourage more students into higher degrees by research. He suggested instigating simple but consistent national reporting on the scholarships available at each institution would solve much of the problem. Providing information on supervisors was more complicated, but possible.

"In defence of the MyUniversity website, they've basically stuck up all the information they can lay their hands on at this time," said Palmer. "But it is achievable to have MyUniversity really do its job and somehow act as a clearing house for all of the research student supervisors in Australia.
Twenty years ago that would have been a mind-blowingly complicated thing to do, but now we've got the technology where it's quite feasible."

He said he was impressed with the undergraduate section of MyUniversity, which provided solid information for school leavers.

RMIT policy adviser Gavin Moodie was positive about the value of publishing data on a single site. However, he said a measure of teaching quality should be implemented and included, as it had been for the MySchool sister site.

"The Commonwealth has spent years and hundreds of thousands of dollars multiplying measures of student satisfaction to duplicate the existing good measures of student satisfaction while ignoring the glaring need for a measure of teaching quality. Until that gap is filled, MyUniversity will continue to be essentially peripheral," Moodie told Campus Review.

He said the website also needed extensive work to code programs in a way that was more relevant to students.

"When seeking information about 'law' or 'journalism' programs, most students would want information on programs that prepare graduates to practice as lawyers or journalists. Instead, MyUniversity returns the much bigger number of programs coded to the law or journalism field. While the programs are correctly coded for some purposes, they are not so informative for the purposes served by MyUniversity," Moodie said.

• MATURE AGED STUDENTS

The outgoing chief executive of Universities Australia is appealing for a national policy that would help boost enrolments of mature-age students. Dr Glenn Withers says a participation target should be implemented for 35 to 65 year olds in much the same way it has been for 25 to 34 year olds in the Bradley review.

"The need for increased enrolments at the mature-age level hasn't been fully factored into governments' plans and incentive systems," Withers told Campus Review.

He said the failure was indicative of wider systemic problems, due in part to the overlapping responsibilities of state and federal governments. "There are a lot of potential conflicts here that for all the goodwill shown in setting ambitious targets for increased participation, increased funding and support, haven't been pulled together adequately," he said.

Mature-age students were falling into the gap, with no one taking responsibility for a cohort that could be key to Australia's apparent looming productivity crisis. Withers said research and analysis were desperately needed to uncover how mature-age students - and possibly other forgotten cohorts - were fairing, and if they required incentives to seek education.

"What you've got is governments running around setting targets that sound reasonable at the time without knowing what they add up to," he said. "You're putting a lot of investment into things that won't emerge for many years, and you want to know those investments are well directed. We say we've got a patchwork economy; we may have a patchwork tertiary system, too, if we're not careful," he said.

The Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations (CAPA) welcomed the idea of a national enrolment target for mature-age students. However, CAPA president Chamonix Terblanche said other factors must be considered simultaneously, especially the casualisation of the academic workforce.

"These are students that, for the most part, have returned to university after gaining diverse experiences, and often significant incomes, in their work and private life," said Terblanche. "The expense of returning to study for these students and the uncertainty of academic employment in an increasingly casualised environment cannot be underestimated as having an impact on their student experience and on retention rates."

Withers agreed, saying the government's related Research Workforce Strategy had not gone far enough because it lacked funding for implementation. "[The strategy's] not nonsense, but it's on stilts," he said.

He linked the value of an older cohort to a future, knowledge-based economy.

"The objective should be to ensure that overall, we are commensurate with world best practice," he said. "For example, countries such as Canada, Israel, Finland and Korea currently have significantly superior achievement of higher education qualifications across the whole 25- to 64-year-old population. We will need this, too, as our mining benefit diminishes. So we should be prepared, by taking the boom proceeds and investing in our people."

Terblanche said data in an upcoming CAPA report would reveal that higher degree by research (HDR) enrolments amongst mature-age students were rising.

"Our findings have confirmed that mature-age students have distinct expectations from their HDR experience and that they view themselves as a distinct cohort with needs specific to their age group and level of experience," she said. "The report will highlight the concerns of mature-age students, which include being undervalued, underfunded, and excluded from student life."

With the passage of the Student Services and Amenities Bill late last year, she called on universities to consult with their postgraduate associations on how best to address the students' needs.

5. HOW TO CONTACT NUPSA

The NUPSA office is located in Room HA150 (opposite Huxley Library) Hunter Building, Callaghan Campus.
The office is open on a part time basis with core hours being from 9.30 am to 2.30 pm Monday to Friday.

Telephone number is (02) 49218894
email - nupsa@newcastle.edu.au

Check out the NUPSA web site - nupsa.org.au
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