Thursday, June 01, 2006

Journalism Scholar

For those of you who has a knack for writing (and thinking) and who don't want the standard fair in medicine, engineering, accountancy or law, you now have someone to look up to. :)

Congratulations to Emily Tan Yean Jia when she became the only Malaysian to be awarded the international scholarship for the Erasmus Mundus Masters in Journalism programme. The Star has the report here. She has been offered a full scholarship totalling €42,000 (RM193,800), including €13,500 (RM62,300) for her tuition fees. Emily graduated with first-class honours in the Bachelor of Communication (Hons) Journalism from Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR) last August.

The scholarships are offered to European and non-European graduate students who obtained a first-class degree awarded by a higher education institution anywhere in the world. The courses will include Reporting Global Change and International Developments in Journalism and Media as well as War and Conflict, Business and Finance and Media Systems and Journalism and Public Spheres in a Comparative Perspective. She will be completing the course in Denmark and the Netherlands for the first year and either in the United Kingdom or Germany during her second year.

Emily was also the journalist who covered Suzanne Lee and her adventurous international exploits (blogged here and here). She has even kindly left a comment on the Supergirl post. Or read her blog. Little did I know that Emily is a 24-year old herself :).

So Emily, let's hope more Malaysians get to follow your footsteps. Good luck and have fun in Europe!

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

looks like UTAR ain't all that bad..after all, this scholarship is pretty prestigious..on another note, I know some guy who graduated from APIIT who got it. In the man, its the person inside who matters, not the institution of higher learning.

Anonymous said...

Congratulations to Emily!!!!!!!!!!!
It is a bit off topic but I hope some day, creative writing will flourish in Malaysia(more competitions, degree courses, scholarship etc), not only journalism.

Kian Ming said...

what a small world. emily goes to the same church as me in pj - first baptist church. her father, dr. tan eng lee, who was an associate prof in microbiology at um, is a pastor in that same church. well done, emily! great that you can have this chance to go abroad.

btw, there are tons of journalism scholarships out there. check out this link:
http://www.newswise.com/resources/j_grants/

but not all of them are open to msians.

Anonymous said...

Dr Tan Eng Lee is a brilliant microbiologist ! He was the only microbiologists capable of giving his lectures in Hebrew!His departure from the University is such a great loss to the University even till today.They dont make quality lecturers like him anymore :((

Anonymous said...

Congratulations to Emily for the scholarship! I read about it over the papers as well.

Just to shed some light about the Erasmus Mundus scholarships. The newspapers (and media) probably gave the impression that it is a scholarship for journalism only. If you would go over to the "actual" Erasmus Mundus official website (http://ec.europa.eu/education/programmes/mundus/projects/index_en.html), you'll realise that it covers a large variety of areas, from the arts, languages, law to even health sciences and mathematics.

If I've not mistakenly read, Malaysia is a "target nation" of this scholarship for 2005/06 (not sure in the future) and they are looking to award 1 or 2 scholarships in certain areas of specialization to our students. My girlfriend recently received an Erasmus Mundus European Masters Programme in Computational Logic, about the same time as Emily's. She would be pursuing the course in Italy for the first year with a choice of another 4 countries for her second year.

Obviously, I would be very proud to have her in the papers as well. :P Oh well...

Anonymous said...

yes,Malaysia is under the asian windows for erasmus mundus. This means more scholarship recipient from Malaysia.

The official list of recipient has not come out yet, the last time I checked. But scholars are already receiving/liaising the scholarship offer with Erasmus.

Like what the previous poster mentioned, the scholarthip is not limited to journalism, but a wide array of scholarships ranging from social science to pure science.

I am another who got in ;) doing security and mobile computing masters

Kahani said...

Hey everyone, Emily here... Suzanne told me this site was blogging about me so, driven by egoism, I had to drop by. ^_^

Thank you for the kind comments, would just like to add a few things.

1. For the price, UTAR is adequate but NOT among the best. Its poor library resources alone limits its use as an academic institution and the few truly excellent lecturers I had who were of international standard, have since left. For students who can afford no better, UTAR is indeed the best place you can be. You get a down-to-earth practical university education with a nod to theoritical academia, but they won't really teach you to write well (never had a red mark on any of my pieces, therefore I learnt nothing), and education is definitely not of international standing. (I'm very nervous about the masters programme).

2. Despite my forwarding the site to the UTAR corporate comm person whom I was assisting with his, ahem, 'writing', and despite numerous explanations that I'm accepted into ONE of the many courses under the Erasmus Mundus umbrella. They got it wrong. And the Star didn't check up on it. Typical. Please google Erasmus Mundus and take a gander at the 50+ courses available.

Cheers!

Anonymous said...

Hi

I am not sure how many Malaysian scholars got in this year but I have been chosen as visiting lecturer within the CoMundus MA in Media, Communication and Cultural Studies. I'll be leaving for University of London in May next year.

Anonymous said...

In all, for the 2006-2007 Academic year, the European Commission has selected 1,377 students and 231 scholars from all over the world to receive Erasmus Mundus scholarships for the next academic year (2006-2007). Nearly EUR 52
million will be devoted to fund the 1377 Erasmus Mundus students’ scholarships and about EUR 2.5 million will be used to fund the university teachers. The funds
will be managed by the Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency.

The 741 students selected under the general Erasmus Mundus programme come from 92 different countries, with China (81), Brazil (43), Russia (36), India (31),
USA (28), Malaysia (25), and Mexico (24) ranking in the first places.

The 636 additional students receiving scholarships under the “Asian Windows”
come mainly from India (288), China (99), Thailand (53), Pakistan (42), Malaysia (32)
and Vietnam (29).

Of the 231 scholars, 199 have been selected under the general Erasmus Mundus programme and 32 under the “China Window”. The selected scholars under the general programme come from 45 different countries. Among the best ranked
countries are the USA (42), Russia (14), India (12), Canada (11) and Brazil (10).

taken from: www.guiafc.com/documentos/2006-IP-789.pdf

Anonymous said...

That is to say there are 57 M'sian students got in for the academic year 2006/7!! Bravo!!

Anonymous said...

for those who have been there, would you say you wouldnt miss this chance for the world, do such scholarship holders have to be able to have their own funds initially

Kahani said...

Wouldn't miss this chance for the world.

It helps to have about 500 euros in your pocket when you arrive until they can set up your bank account.

The funds are more than sufficient if you're budget conscious and you can always work.

Unknown said...

I'm an SPM candidate for 2009 and I'm in pure science. Even so, my heart's in writing and I really want to go into journalism. This post really got my brain into high gear. I'm gonna show my parents this post since they, like most Malaysian parents, prefer their daughter to go into medic/engineering/law, which I DO NOT think are interesting at all.
So thank you :)