President of Consortium of Malaysian University Dato’ Seri Wong Tze Wei

CEO of University of Technology Malaysia    Salleh Bin Kassim

Good afternoon, everyone!

First of all, I would like to thank the conference for giving me the opportunity to say a few words here. I will leave my time to the local University of Technology Malaysia to introduce this university.

University of Technology Malaysia: Thank you, Dr. Wong. First of all, I would like to congratulate the Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture on the successful convening of this Inaugural Meeting of Belt and Road Architectural University International Consortium. Today, we also want to thank Dr. Wong for inviting us to join this consortium.

This is the location of our university. We have two campuses. One is in Kuala Lumpur. Our main campus is in the southernmost city of Malaysia. It’s a very large campus with almost 1,148 square kilometers. This is the view of our campus. The first three pictures are our large main campus located in the south end, and the fourth picture shows the campus site in Kuala Lumpur.

We have a total of more than 21,000 students, of whom 9,000 are postgraduates, almost half of them are with a doctorate and half are with a master degree. By 2020, we expect that the proportion of undergraduates and postgraduates will be almost 4 to 6. We currently have about 2700 international students. For our consortium, it’s also of great significance, because the scale of our students, both those who go abroad to study and those who come here to study, is very large. We also hope to attract more students through consortium.

In our University of Technology, there are faculty and staff in various departments. For example, there are staffs in different departments on the campus. In addition, we also have campuses in other branch campuses. Generally speaking, we have 55 undergraduate programs, moreover, there are 82 master's degree courses and 120 professional research projects awarded doctoral degrees, so the proportion of postgraduates and doctoral candidates here is quite high. Architecture is basically our key discipline. In our university, we will find some new fields, such as frontier science, innovative engineering, public health, smart digital community development, and sustainable development of resources. Because our colleague in Paris just talked to us about the significance of the development of smart cities, we also fully agree with them here. Another focus, as I just talked to you, about the sustainability of resources. In these fields, we have different research institutes, and special research projects, or call it a center of excellence, and we will publish corresponding papers and academic publications. When it comes to our internationalization process, we have students from 62 different countries and regions, and there are mainly 15 countries from ASEAN, South Asia, East Asia, Middle East and North Africa and so on. For example, international students from Bangladesh, as well as from Palestine and Singapore, are all important components of us. Therefore, we have a large scale or a large number of international students on campus, which also reflects our internationalism. Here, you can see our various global rankings. We ranked the 21st in the comprehensive rankings of global universities. In addition, we ranked among the top 100 in electric power engineering, as well as all engineering disciplines, environment and architecture. I think it's also a way for us to further strengthen our ranking in the future so that by 2020, at least in terms of environment and architecture, we can be among the top 50 in the world through our cooperation with the consortium. In this regard, I would like to tell you that there are mainly more than 300 academic research projects for our global cooperation, including MIT, which ranks first in the world, and other well-known global institutions. We have always been looking forward to cooperating with outstanding institutions. However, even if the academic ability of some institutions is not particularly strong, we are also willing to establish cooperative relations with them. In other words, we are willing to cooperate with everyone and grow together with everyone. After this, I would like to introduce to you that we also hope that we can find our new field of expertise on the basis of our architecture under the context of The Belt and Road initiative (namely our international consortium). Because now we have the advantages of ASEAN’s architectural universities, and we have all kinds of other advantages in the world, then we can gather the previous advantages on the basis of the consortium of architectural universities. As I said to you just now, we cooperated with MIT. This project can be said to be very important for us. It mainly awards postgraduate degrees to countries with South-South cooperation and the Group of 77. We work with MIT to select students. After students are selected, they will stay for five months to study. They will stay for four months at MIT in Boston and 9 months for postdoctoral projects, doing research in both places. We have been working on this project for five years and will continue for another five years. In this part, it is also a department I am familiar with. This department was established in 1972. This college is called the School of the Built Environment, which includes the Department of Architecture established in 1994, the Department of Quantitative Survey established in 1974 and the Department of Urban and Regional Planning established in 1974. I don’t know if you are very familiar with these two departments. Of course, now the quantitative survey in the United States is actually about the cost of our construction projects. Different countries have different names. Anyway, these two departments were established in 1974. In 2002, we added a landscape project. In addition, there are two research centers, one of which is called the category architecture center, which mainly studies the architectural cultural heritage of the whole Malaysia. After that, we also have another development research center focusing on the overall urban planning. Let me introduce our faculty and staff. We have 28 academic staff here, including associate professors and professors. Of all the faculty and staff teams, 77% of them have PhD degrees. We have a total of 101 staff.

On this page, the figures we see are about our enrollment, which only refers to the four departments I just mentioned. We currently have a total of 1,310 students, and there are mainly five undergraduate programs and seven graduate programs. And although I mentioned that the proportion of graduate students in our university is relatively high, in our entire college, the proportion of graduate students only accounts for 32%, and 68% are undergraduates.

This page describes what advantages we will bring to the consortium. First of all, our students have good mobility. For example, we can carry out student activities with you. This mainly includes two kinds: one is that we are a very good place to receive overseas students, and we are also the source of overseas students. Specifically, we say that we are the receiving place of overseas students because we have a summer camp program, in which students can stay one or two semesters. Now we have entered a new semester beginning in November. If you are interested in it, you can send overseas students to our university for further study in this semester.

Here, you can see our statistics on international student exchanges as of last year. As you can see, the number of international students who go abroad to study or those who come to our university to study is quite large. In addition, we will also organize various academic seminars and exchange activities. For example, we will soon hold global engineering education forum in 2017, and there will be some very important educational activities in 2018 and 2019, which will be hosted by us. That’s all I want to say. Now let’s give the microphone to Mr. Wong Tze Wei again.

Wong Tze Wei: Next year, our conference will be held in this university. Thank you!

(Compiled according to the shorthand record at the conference)