The University of Macau (UM) has long been implementing whole-person education, devoting itself to the balanced development of the students. In order to enhance the results of its students and to encourage them to study, UM has recruited, this academic year, many excellent students from the territory and from mainland China, consequently raising the quality of new students. Besides, during the past academic year, the students of UM had outstanding performances in various international academic events and competitions, having made great achievements.
In the present academic year, for the student recruitment, UM has gone on with the principle of “picking the excellent ones”. According to the statistics, in comparison to last year, the results of local students during the recruitment rose by 5 % to 10 %, while the number of excellent students proposed by the principals of various secondary schools for direct admission to UM also increased by 15%, occupying 22% of the total number of new enrolled students. The results of students from mainland China during the recruitment had significant rises as well, when compared with last year, approaching the grade requirement of important universities in China. This shows that more applicants of high marks would like to study in UM. As for the postgraduate programmes, there were nearly 1,000 applications this year. At last, 9 have been accepted as PhD students while 322 as Masters students. Among them, students from mainland China amount to about one-third. Most of them are excellent students recommended to UM by the Ministry of Education of China or by other universities.
During all these years, UM has been encouraging students to participate actively in academic exchanges and the students have been performing very well in many international academic competitions. Their results were extremely outstanding in the academic year 2004/2005. For instance, Elvis Mak Pui In, a PhD student from the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering got the 2nd place in the 2005 Design Automation Conference (DAC)/the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) Student Design Contest. He has also received the Best Paper Award at the 7th IEEJ International Analog VLSI Workshop and the Silver Leaf Certificate in the 1st PhD Research In Micro-Electronics & Electronics (PRIME) held in year 2005. In addition, together with Cherry Mok Weng Ieng who is a Masters student in the same department, Elvis won the second prize at the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (IEEE) 47th Midwest Symposium on Circuits and Systems (MWSCAS) Student Paper Contest. On the other hand, in the Regional Inter-University Postgraduate Electrical and Electronic Engineering Conference (RIUPEEEC) taken place in 2005, the students from the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering of UM won 3 Merit Awards, among a total of 6 awards. Furthermore, in the 1st Asia Pacific Intervarsity Chinese Debate Open held in Singapore, the UM Debate Team was the champion. At the Trading Agent Competition (TAC) held at the Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Agents System (AAMAS) conference in New York, Jacky Chan U Chong and Lei Man Kin, both of whom are UM fresh graduates majoring in software engineering in the Faculty of Science and Technology (FST), managed to win the third and sixth prizes, respectively, in TAC for Supply Chain Management and TAC Classic. Likewise, a group of Software Engineering students of UM won the top prize in the Tourism and Hospitality category at the Asia Pacific Information and Communication Technology Awards (APICTA) 2004.
In view of such good results, the University of Macau will continue to try its best to allow its students to have better performances and to strive for their greater achievement in the academic field.