By Andrew Bugembe
The Uganda Christian University (UCU) Department of Computing and Technology today held its first-ever meet-and-greet session between staff and postgraduate students.
About 40 students who have been accepted into three different master’s programs for the Academic Year 2023 attended the programme which took place inside the ICMI building, at the Main Campus.
The purpose of the meeting was to allow students to meet their department heads, UCU staff from other departments including the Hamu Mukasa Library and fellow students in person, as all previous sessions had been conducted virtually.
The session, according to Dr. Innocent Ndibatya, the Head of the Department, was a success and provided a valuable opportunity for networking and relationship-building among students and department heads.
“Overall, it was a great chance for students to connect with the department, and gain insights into the programs they will be taking at the university,” Dr. Ndibatya said.
Since a majority of the Postgraduate programmes at UCU have since the advent of COVID-19 gone virtual, such sessions offer new students an opportunity to familiarize themselves with the university campus and also know the various university staff, whose help they may need during the course of their study.
” I have learnt how to model and assimilate systems, I have also learnt how to manage systems securely and this has come in really handy for me even at my workplace,” says Drake Tamale, one of the Masters of Information technology students, and also staff at the UCU Library.
“This meet-and-greet has helped put a face to the names of some of my classmates and lecturers, who I had never met since we started to study.”
Doreen Atukunda, the Coordinator of Postgrad programmes at the Department of Computing and Technology noted that such a meeting will in the long run bridge a gap that tends to exist between students and staff whose main interaction happens online. ” Such a session opens our students to the resources on campus and also affords them the opportunity to forge cordial relationships with their lecturers,” said Atukunda.
Emmanuel Isabirye, a first-year student of MSc in Data Science and Analytics noted that the session offered him an opportunity to hear from experts including a South Africa-based scholar named Dr. Jason A. Samuels.
Dr. Samuels was a guest presenter from the University of Stellenbosch. He presented a Data Science-oriented paper on Green Technology and Sustainability, which is part of a research project he is currently undertaking. This offered good inspiration to some of the students who have enrolled for Data Science, which is one of the fairly new courses in the Department.
