News Archive

Postgraduate students' lives have become a whole lot easier.

As a result of New Courses, the numbers of postgraduate course enrolments is becoming too much for individual faculties to handle by themselves, so a new Postgraduate Admissions Team has been created within the Admissions Centre.

And their mission is to streamline domestic coursework degree enrolments and keep almost everything online.

"I only have good things to say about Barbara Goldflam and her Postgraduate Admissions Team," said Rabecca Light, Postgraduate Co-ordinator in the Business School. "They have made our lives easier as well as the students' even though they have only taken over two of our postgrad courses.  We are hoping, in time, to transfer more of our courses to them."

Barbara Goldflam, Shelley Giles, Naseem Mkandawire and Glen Stewart have worked hard on streamlining the business processes, including setting up an online verification process for student transcripts and other documents, to reduce paperwork, time and inconvenience for the prospective students.

"When students accept an offer of a postgrad place from the University, they are directed to the Postgraduate UniStart website (within the Future Students website).  There they can find everything they need including links to Pheme, studentConnect , the handbook, the timetable and OLCR.  They can also use askUWA for answers to their questions," Ms Goldflam said.

"The Postgrad UniStart site has been modelled on the undergrad version, which has worked successfully for many years.  We have put a lot of time and effort into populating the Future Students site with postgraduate courses, which has made our web presence more student-centred, with easier navigation and more accurate information, drawn dynamically from Callista and the handbook, wherever possible," she said.

Ms Giles said the team was working on putting everything online, including the traditional printed postgraduate handbook. "Postgrads are hard to locate, unlike undergrads who are all in schools," she said. "There are very few events or places, apart from the Postgrad and Honours Expo once a year, where we can distribute the handbook.  So it makes sense to put it online with everything else.

"We are creating a one-stop shop which is continually and automatically updated with the latest information from the faculties."

Ms Goldflam said that things would change in 2015 when the first graduates from the New Courses undergraduate degrees would be competing for postgraduate places in courses including medicine, dentistry, engineering and law.

"The intake will be massive and every faculty has a slightly different way of assessing and offering places. It will be a challenge for us but I hope that, by then, we will have created a University-wide policy for assessing and selecting students. I think it will be more like the undergraduate preferences process," she said.

"The Postgrad Admissions Team works in partnership with Faculties.  They still select their students, then we come in with the administration."