Malta’s university opens its doors to 3,461 new students

The University of Malta this year opens its doors to 3,461 new students, 2,571 of which will be registering for undergraduate courses, while 890 students will be reading for postgraduate degrees.

1,321 students will be joining Junior College, bringing the total number of students to 2,496.

The total number of students at the UoM now reaches 11,226, of which 6,471 are female students and 4,755 are male students. In all, 777 courses will be followed.

A total of 655 international students representing 80 different countries will be pursuing studies at the University.

Welcoming the new students, University Rector Juanito Camilleri urged students to strive, work hard and push their limits beyond their comfort zone.

“There is no shame in making mistakes... To err or fail is a natural and essential part of  a busy and engaged life,” he said.

Camilleri reminded fellow academics that the methods for teaching and examining a course of studies ought not to be based on the ability to memorise or repeat facts but on how a student  managed to internalise the subject, and how this learning was then hopefully demonstrated naturally in the student’s creative and individual way of thinking.

“Students should recognise learning as an intimate experience and not as a cosmetic and artificial project,” Camilleri added.

He augured that students would savour the taste of success and enhance their appetite for more.

He invited students to grow as engaged human beings, sensitive to the needs of others, aware of what was happening in the world - a world of poverty, wars, a world with an insatiable hunger for resources.

“To this effect I invite all the University community to seek to make the world a  better place, as it was in this manner that we all became graduates...graduates of life.”

Camilleri also encouraged student to live a full life and take up opportunities abroad.

With increasing numbers in international students, Camilleri warned that any racist behaviour would not be tolerated.  

Work on a Master Plan for the Msida Campus envisages five major projects, the construction of at least two of which is scheduled to commence in the next year or two when European Regional Development funding is secured.

The University seeks to construct a state-of-the-art Sustainable Living Complex requiring an investment of circa €36 million to house the Faculty for Built Environment, the Faculty of Education, the Institute of Sustainable Energy, the Institute of Earth Systems, and a School of Visual Art; the construction of a Post-doc, Creative, and Engineering Labs Complex – coined as the University’s trans-disciplinary “Research Incubator”.

According to Camilleri, this would bring studios for the University’s School of Performing Arts to the heart of campus, and would create, for the very first time, facilities for trans-disciplinary thematic research clusters of postdoctoral researchers to be housed.

Moreover, he said, it would provide much needed additional space for the engineering laboratories, for the Institute for Creative Thinking, the Centre for Entrepreneurship, and for the business incubator. This project too would require an investment of no less than an additional €39 million.

Longer term plans to include the construction of a University Residence and Community Complex on the land recently purchased adjacent to the main entrance on Campus. He spoke of plans for a Clinical and Health Sciences Complex with extensive underground parking and public transport facilities on the site of the current main student car park. This would allow the Medical School to move out of Mater Dei to increase bed capacity. Rector also said that plans were drafted for the University Sports and Wellbeing Complex to bring sport back to life on Campus. Professor Camilleri admitted to not knowing yet where the funds for this would come from but he was certain everything was achievable if all worked together.

“Unless we continue to seriously upgrade the infrastructure on Campus to match modern day requirements, in a decade or two, this 420 year-old Alma Mater will only be able to look back, alas, not forward!” he said.

Rector also spoke of the embellishment of the Valletta Campus into an international conferencing and graduate centre, of plans to expand the facilities of the Gozo Campus, and the drawing up of an extensive list of works that needed to be done at the Junior College.