I was just nosing around on Facebook, and and my news feeds had conveniently informed me that my long-time friend W had just posted an album online. As it looked interesting I ventured in and as you can imagine, living in a small community as ours, I recognised some faces. Then I recognised some MORE faces, and my boss! I guess that explains why the work place has been in anxious mode for the past few days. 😉

Told you I recognised some faces. 🙂

Turns out it was a majorly huge event, going on out there in London, run by a 6-person committee of postgraduate students that was sponsored by the Brunei Students Unit. There were key players from the Brunei’s High Education Orion’s Belt, the Vice Chancellor of UBD, Dr Zulkarnain Hanafi, the Deputy Rector of UNISSA, Dr Hj Mohd Yusop Hj Damit, and the ITB Head of Research (if I’m not mistaken), Dr Hj Supry Hj Ag Ladi.

Well, all I can say is that, this must have been some event. Congratulations and I hope next year more participation can be observed from the Brunei’s youthful bijak dan pandai yang menimba ilmu di negara orang.

For more information obviously not written by me (hehe), there is more after the jump. 🙂

This academic event is aimed at facilitating research discussions between different academic fields and how students’ feel their research will contribute to our nation’s development. Around 70 people attended the symposium where 10 postgraduates shared their research experience with the audience. There were 3 separate panels of  education, national identity and public policy and a wide range of topics were discussed that included inclusive education, architecture, art, transport studies, obesity and e-government, among others.

The 3 keynote speakers mentioned above gave great speeches highlighting the importance of research and their current efforts to improve the quality of research in their respective institutions.  They were also engaged in very interesting and stimulating dialogues with members of  the audience where significant issues such as data accessibility were raised.

Overall, the event turned out to be a great success. It received amazing support from the keynote speakers as well as members of the general audience. This collective act of academic exploration highlighted Brunei’s burgeoning intellectual capital and this will be a worthy asset in the course of our nation’s development.

The committee would once again like to thank those who came to support the event and the hope is that next year, the symposium will be bigger and cover a wider range of academic fields.