What is it about the sciences that you want to know about in terms of being a part of this exciting future? Well, you should be aware that of all the growing occupations in Australia, 75% of them require STEM, that's science, technology, engineering and maths. Surprisingly, at least to me, the top five highest paid jobs in Adelaide are in STEM industries. STEM graduates are paid well, even straight out of their degree, learning up to, in some cases, 30% more than any other field. And if you're interested in the agricultural area, when you leave, there's up to five jobs for each graduate out there. All in all, there's lots of growth projected for people with STEM knowledge. How do you get that knowledge? When you ask employees what they want, there on the screen are the top five skills that are sought. Now, take note, these are not being trained for a specific skill. These are what we call transferable skills, active learning, being able to think critically and assess, being a problem solver, knowing what a problem is and turning your hand to finding a solution. And finally, interpersonal skills. All of these are what you get out of a Bachelor of Science degree. Moreover, the top three certainly are the essence of the scientific method. So built in, in understanding the scientific method, you develop these skills intrinsically. Now, these skills are what employers want, but it's difficult for employers to teach them, so they look to the universities to be providing the so-called transferable skills. And then, of course, why study science at the University of Adelaide? There are several reasons, as shown on the infographic behind me. It's been rated to give five-star student support in sciences. It's number one in South Australia for science in the Graduate Satisfaction Surveys that are taken every year. At the heart of the university lies the academics who do research as well as teaching. Their research in all our fields in STEM subjects are rated at or above world level in a recent assessment done by the Australian Government. The University of Adelaide is ranked typically in the 100th to 150th in the world. It's the top 1% of universities in the world, and that certainly puts it number one in South Australia. The University of Adelaide is part of the prestigious group of eight universities. These are universities that include Sydney, Melbourne, Queensland. Adelaide is part of that. And along with those other GO8 universities, Adelaide is proud of its contributions to research and teaching. Well, that's enough from me. Why don't you hear it from the horse's mouth? So, I'd like to first up introduce our graduate, Dr Ben Owen. He completed a physics degree, a high performance computing degree in 2011 and went on to complete his PhD, studying Large Hadron Colliders. In 2015, and since then, he's been working at the Bureau of Meteorology, one of the most trusted institutions in Australia and one that all of us have been turning our eye towards with the recent terror that's been wiping across Australia over the last few months. Sorry, Ben, on that somber note, so if you can perk up the environment. Ben, over to you. Alright, well, first I just want to say thank you to the University of Adelaide for having me back to speak with you all tonight. Yeah, my name is Ben. I am a graduate of the University of Adelaide. I, looking back, basically started in 2007 when I began my degree and I was here for just under a decade.  So, I began my time at the University of Adelaide, as Greg said, doing a Bachelor of Science in High Performance Computational Physics. And this was a four-year degree, so the first three years were the undergraduate followed by an honors year. And I guess this degree was, as it sort of said, the name suggests was a degree that sort of specializes in, I guess, training you in physics and with mathematics, along with the computer science to really give you those skills to sort of, I guess, tackle really complex problems both within the physics, well, essentially the physics domain, but the reality is it's not just physics that you can consider the problems in all of the sciences, really. And I guess, looking past, well, having moved on from my degree and my time at the University, I've come to realize that it's not just sciences. It's essentially all walks of life. So, I think this degree was really powerful because it really equipped me with the skills I need to really tackle really complex problems and think critically. But, yeah, it was a fairly rigid degree in terms of what I could do. And for me, this sort of suited me really well because it was sort of, I had a really keen interest going into university for science, particularly in physics and mathematics. And this degree really sort of sated that interest. So, I was sort of exposed to a wide array of courses in both physics and mathematics, but also a bit of computer science to sort of, I suppose, broaden my horizons. And I found it a really rewarding degree. And so much so that, yeah, I went on to do my honors, which was, I guess, the final year of the degree, which was really, I guess, focusing on more advanced topics in, again, physics and math, as well as doing an honors project, which was a year-long project. And I guess, at the end of that, I sort of, well, certainly was probably the toughest year of my studies, but probably one of the most rewarding as well. So, it was, I guess, coming out of that, it really sort of brought all my time in undergraduate together in the sense that I could sort of look back and sort of look at the project that I'd done, really sort of reinforce those sort of, I guess, those skills that employees are looking for. So, it's all about that critical thinking. It's about that problem-solving. And I guess it's also about working in a team to sort of try and tackle a problem. And it's not just sort of a problem that's, you know, just, I guess, it's cutting edge research. So, you're working on problems that are not just for the sake of it. You're actually doing things that are meaningful. So, that was my undergraduate. I then went on to sort of stay at the University of Adelaide to do my PhD. So, my PhD was actually in particle and nuclear physics. And it was studying the structure of protons and neutrons, not from an experimental perspective, but more of a theoretical perspective. So, it was essentially coming up with computational and numerical approaches to solving complex problems, and essentially this complex problem being the structure of protons and neutrons. So, and I think to be honest, I think my PhD was probably the time that I enjoyed most at the University of Adelaide. I think it was during that that I really, I think in terms of the science and the work I was working on, it was really interesting and I really enjoyed what I was doing. I think I also began to sort of integrate myself more with the university community. So, I think sort of getting to see what else was going on from both the broader science community in the University of Adelaide, but also, I guess, broader across the whole university. And so, I think it was really during my PhD that I really enjoyed my time here. So, essentially, yeah, my PhD took four and a half years. At the end of that came to realize that academia wasn't for me and so I started to look further afield to sort of see what kind of jobs would interest me. I think during my time, during my PhD I did a bit of teaching and that was something that really sort of appealed to me. But I also saw an opportunity to join the Bureau of Meteorology as a graduate trainee and this also looked like quite an interesting opportunity. So, I applied towards the end of my PhD and wasn't actually successful in getting in, so that sort of pushed me to do another degree, which was a graduate diploma of meteorology, which took a year. And during that year, essentially, yeah, it was doing, as you'd expect, sort of learning to become a teacher, but I think it was also sort of developing a whole bunch of skills that, again, during my science degree, undergraduate and postgraduate degree, sort of reinforcing some of those things like communication and sort of sort of subject matter expert and really, you know, trying to teach others about what you do and why it's important. So, again, in its own right was really a useful thing to do. And then towards the end of that, I just figured I'd give the Bureau of Meteorology another go and happen to be successful the second time around. So, yeah, that was my time at the University of Adelaide. I think what drew me to, well, just thinking about my time here, why did I come here? I think coming in and sort of sitting where you are now, I was really drawn to the University of Adelaide, probably from more of an academic perspective. For me, it, well, it still is, I guess, the best university in South Australia for sciences, particularly for physics and mathematics. It's got such a strong program and I don't think any of the other universities in SA compare. So that's what drew me towards coming here. But I think looking back, I think there was a lot of things that I sort of took for granted and it wasn't really until sort of finishing up at the University of Adelaide that it really sort of dawned on me that there's many more reasons to come here other than just, you know, the academic side. So, I mean, the facilities here are outstanding. So, amazing campuses both, you know, up here at North Terrace, but there's also the White Campus in Roseworthy and these are world-class campuses. There's the world-class research that's done here. So, as Greg mentioned, is that all the research that's undertaken in the Faculty of Sciences is sort of cutting-edge and world-leading. And so, I think it's sort of working alongside and with these academics who are sort of working on cutting-edge problems is really an attractive reason to be here. And I think with that sort of comes the high-quality teaching. So, I guess, if you're a world-class institution in terms of your research, the other side of that is the subject matter experts are sort of leading in their fields and so the teaching is outstanding. And also the exceptional staff. And that's not just the teaching staff, but also the administrative staff. I think it's sort of towards the end of your, well, the undergraduate and into my PhD that I really sort of began to appreciate these people, but they are sort of instrumental in everyone's success. So, I think that's something worth pointing out. And then the last thing was the vibrant student life and campus culture. So, I think during my undergraduate, it's probably something I didn't take as much time to sort of enjoy, but ultimately I did. And I think it's part of the experience. So, I really encourage people to not just sort of look down and study the books.  So, I guess, a bit about what I do now. So, I'm basically a meteorologist with the Bureau of Meteorology. And I've been there since 2016. So, the first year was really to just sort of train myself in essentially meteorology, so the weather science. I guess all of the study that I'd done academically prepared me for the subject matter, but it also, I think post that, it also prepared me for doing the job really effectively. So, I guess the primary responsibility currently is a weather forecaster. So, my job is to produce and communicate weather forecasts. The process we sort of go through doing that is analyzing huge amounts of observational and numerical weather prediction data. So, it's a lot of data analysis. And then from that is essentially synthesizing this into understanding how the atmosphere is sort of, the state it's in now and how it's going to evolve into the future. So, it's sort of that problem solving and analytic skills there. And through that, with that picture, we then sort of produce weather forecasts. So, and weather forecasts are a variety of users. So, there's the public weather forecast that you sort of get on the internet and through the meteor outlets. But it's also aviation. So, it's a huge subscriber to our forecast. As well as I guess the key one at the moment is the emergency services. So, as a weather forecaster, we're basically writing forecasts for firefighters out there on the field to really try and understand what the weather's going to do and sort of help them to really make a difference in finding those fires. So, I guess how did my degree prepare me for this job? So, I guess I sort of mentioned, yeah, academically, joining the bureau, I was well and truly equipped to sort of essentially do all the course work and really excel at doing that. But I think more importantly is, it's those soft skills that are probably the most important thing in terms of what I do in my day-to-day job. So, I guess thinking about it, the things that sort of come to mind are effective communication of technical matter. So, I guess a forecast is only as good, well, you can have the best forecast in the world, but if you can't communicate that, it's basically useless. It's sort of skills to communicate essentially all this technical information to the user.  So, that was one of the things that I found, well, one of those skills that throughout both my undergraduate, postgraduate and then into my graduate bed, that was something that sort of came out. Working seamlessly within a team and independently, so these are skills that I think just throughout any degree you sort of develop. You know, very much a team-based problem-solving sort of environment. So, it's not just about doing your own thing, it's about working with others to really try and crack problems and come out with solutions. So, that's, again, something that came out of my degree. Working to strict deadlines. So, as a forecaster, we basically only have a certain amount of time to do this analysis, come out, and then provide a forecast. And so, that's a really important thing. Essentially, I think as a scientist, you sort of train to think critically, but you're also sort of encouraged to take a leap and sort of make a judgment. So, that's something, again, through my degree, it's sort of these skills that sort of come out time and time again in what I do. Learn from my failures and then to sort of display flexible thinking against some of the things that I find really useful. And I think it's not until sort of, I guess, especially postgraduate, but also into actually doing my job with all these really important skills, and these are really important skills that have allowed me to succeed in what I do now. So, I guess, finishing up, where do I see myself going into the future with what I've done so far and where I'm at now? I think forecasting like a lot of things is going to change into the future, and that's because of technology. So, what we do now effectively technology as our weather models get better and we get more and better at doing things. So, as technology changes, we need to change the way we're doing things, and currently the Bureau is actually going through a bit of a transformation in terms of the way we do things because of this. I'd like to think, I mean, going through this process is a lot of complicated problems that we need to sort of try and solve and new ways of doing things. I think it's really, I mean, I'm thinking about all the more of a production-based role to being more of a communication-based role and really being sort of a liaison, try to provide weather information rather than provide weather forecasts. I know they sound very similar, but there is a subtle difference there and I think it's that expertise that sort of is the way that we're moving forwards and I'd like to think that everything that I've done up until now, particularly my time at university, sort of equipped me to really succeed in this future role. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Amy Norman and I am 18 years old. I graduated from Golden Grip High School in 2018 and completed my first year of uni study in 2019. During my brief talk this evening, I'll be discussing my studying experience throughout uni and my goals for the future. In my final few years of high school education, I began attending the informative open days at Flinders Adelaide SA Uni. Since young age, I'd attend specific talks regarding animal related subjects. By doing this and some additional online research, I chose to study a Bachelor of Science in Animal Behavior at Adelaide University. As part of this degree, students are required to attend classes at Adelaide Uni's Roseworthy Campus. This campus is certainly one of a kind. Not only does it provide a peaceful and resourceful place to study, a range of animals are located directly on campus, allowing students to study. This campus has multiple student run animal related clubs. These clubs are extremely educational and are a great opportunity, especially if you wish to specialise in a specific species. A few highlights during my first year of study in this degree include volunteering at the Royal Adelaide Show with Roseworthy's Pig Club, presentations by experts in the field of animal behaviour and several opportunities to study is the support services. In my experience, I have utilized peer mentoring and the faculty office. These two services assisted me in a plethora of issues regarding exams, enrolment and general subject content. However, these are only two support services out of the many that Adelaide Uni provide. Other support services include the academic drop-in centre and of course the lecturers. My life as a university student has been constantly encouraging me to better myself. However, I look forward to graduating as I am eager to start in the workforce. Once I graduate, I hope to become more involved in the volunteering community whilst working towards my ultimate career goal of becoming a zoologist. And thank you for listening. Hey, everyone. I'm Lucy. I've just completed my undergraduate degree in wildlife conservation biology. I'm from Country South in Adelaide to start my degree. And I chose this degree, unlike many people, just a couple of days before the SATAC deadline. I decided very last minute to make a dramatic change from physiotherapy to wildlife conservation. And now three years ahead, I know that this is probably the best decision that I've ever made in my life. Coming to Adelaide Uni has been the best thing for me and this is not the best anymore. It has been an incredibly well run, hands-on, interesting, engaging and enjoyable course with so many opportunities to get outside, build relationships and be involved in local conservation activities. Adelaide Uni itself has an amazing reputation, as you've heard already, and so many extracurricular opportunities and support services that made this uni the most appealing to me. Over the past three years, I've made lifelong friends with so many people, including my lecturers and demonstrating staff. And I fostered a very strong passion for the environment. But as I said, I was not always so sure of this decision. But in my process of deciding this degree, I attended talks just like this. I went to open days and it was a talk just quite a lot smaller that inspired me to do my degree. So now, just finished, I've got an amazing group of friends that support me. Throughout my degree, the best parts of it were probably the overseas study tour that I had the opportunity to do. So I went to Cambodia with a few of my lecturers and some fellow students and looked at the area and it was the most, it was probably the pinnacle of my degree. It really shifted things. And I met so many people through it. And it really just was the highlight. But there's also lots of work experience opportunities as well. So I've been on lots of field trips, a lot of camps and I feel like this really distinguished herself at Laid Uni from other unis because I've just finished my degree what I'm going to do in the workplace. So I've been out in the field and I've done environmental surveys and I've met professionals and I feel very confident at the end of just a three year degree in going into wildlife conservation and being able to implement all the things that I've learned. Throughout my time at Uni, I think I utilised quite a lot of things. Obviously I moved from the country to the city to the national colleges which made this transition quite a lot easier. But also over time built that really great support network of friends and lecturers who I'm sure I'll still be leaning on for years to come. And many of these friendships were fostered through the extra curricular activities and clubs and I supported academically especially through past sessions which are peer assisted students, peer assisted study sessions. So that's what I've done. I've done more tutorials with younger students about their courses and also academic drop-in centres. They're really great any time of the week you drop in and get help on your assignments. But probably the most out of every resource that the Adelaide Union offers were my lecturers and my demonstrators. In my degree of study, I found that all of the lecturers and demonstrators were very, very happy to come to them with questions about my degree or just about general volunteer opportunities. And they were just always really happy to help, which was great. The next step for me in this journey, I'm going to be staying at Adelaide Union because I can't get enough of it. And in just under a month I'll begin my research on the impacts of microplastic pollution in the Spencer Gulf. This is my honours year and I'm like many graduates. I'm really confident that there's going to be lots of opportunities after my honours degree purely because of the amazing network of people at the Adelaide Uni. And I know that I can probably go to one of my lecturers and find myself work experience or opportunities in NGOs and departments all through the conservation and ecology area. So I hope that was helpful. My name's Miskan. I just graduated from my undergrad in Bachelor of Science in Space Science and Astrophysics. I'm about to start my masters in FEB. Not 100% sure what my research project will be, but it will be in either modeling or something experimental. I wasn't too sure exactly what I had to do in this talk, so I thought the best thing I could do is give a bit of advice to people starting from scratch. What I would like to say is to get into my masters, my GPA was just under the cutoff to get into my masters and I thought that was the end of it and I'd have to do my honours, which again, not the end of the world, but I desperately wanted to get into my masters. And I found that talking to my lecturers, talking to any stuff, everyone working here at the university wants you to help. They will come up with 100 ways to get you to where you want to go and make sure you participate to the fullest in the university because that is the best way to succeed. You can do well in all of your courses, but if you're ever in any situation where you need the slightest amount of help, there's like 100 people at the university here to help you. Because I found a way, there's a GP and I found a way to get my lecturer to write a letter of recommendation and found a way to get into my masters despite the fact that my GPA was just under where I had to be. And I would say, again, transitioning from high school to university, it's very important to remember that it's not as, it's a lot, the structure is very free at university. You have to be very self-motivated, self-driven to succeed at university, compared to in high school where your teachers do look after you. A lecturer will not know you until you introduce yourself to them. A tutor will not know you until you introduce yourself to them. The best thing I can say is just to put yourself out there, participate, join clubs, go to all of the resources provided to you, go to the academic drop-in centers. There's so much available at this university. Just make sure you're there. Hi, guys. My name's Ella. I'm currently just about to start my third year in the Bachelor of Science Advanced Degree studying microbiology, immunology and chemistry, biochemistry, not chemistry. You'll get into that later. When I first started, or at least what attracted me to the university was the fact that since I was probably this tall, I knew that I wanted to be an immunologist. I knew I wanted to be helping people find science a great thing. But throughout my year 10 and year 11, work experience opportunities, I went and did. I actually did work experience with work observation with the Wake campus to do with their viticulture and wine making. That was three days of observation and that just cemented Adelaide for me. But I also did had experience working in an accounting firm and found an office job. No, thank you. So, without work experience and then I'll sort of tack into this a little bit later, I found that more of what I didn't want to do. But coming to Adelaide actually has helped me cement what I do want to do. So, I didn't know what I wanted to come into, whether I wanted to go into medicine, whether I wanted to do health and medical sciences, whether I wanted to come into a science, whether I wanted to go into being a practicing doctor, whether I wanted to be a scientist, maybe further on. So, this was the willen I went to a doctor's office a couple of years ago and I feel of the people where we were sitting right now inspired me and I saw myself in them which was just amazing. And after coming out of this talk I walked out and went yeah, this is the place. This is for me. So, my journey after coming out class of 13. So coming to university and especially in O week, walking into a campus that has so many students was very very daunting for me and was a very scary experience in the first couple of weeks but I found that again all of the support services that the guys have already touched on and there's not really much that I can say that they haven't said but I found that just putting yourself out there and having the confidence it takes a little while to get a hold of but having the confidence to be able to put yourself out there and say hey my name's Ella this is what I'm interested in what are you interested in like you have to make conversation with people as scary as it is and so that was that and then coming into university the first couple of weeks I found very very difficult and so the support services that I use was the counseling service and it's a completely free you can just walk in make an appointment and say hey help me or at least just someone can can you listen to what I have to say and to be able to talk and talk to someone without judgment was something that was absolutely like a game changer for me so I think so that was that as well getting into the academic side I used all of the drop-in centers I went to a few past sessions as well I wish I stayed with pass I would highly recommend going to a past session if you can and sticking with it everything else fell under I've sort of once I got my footing I was able to make my own decisions make my own choices and be comfortable and confident with those so coming and so working my way through my degree I started I actually started off planning to do a chemistry major but I found I first in first year chemistry was amazing I absolutely loved it I love Greg's lectures in first semester and I have fond memories of all of the practicals that were done but I got into second semester up second year first semester and found that it wasn't for me I felt I had hit a roadblock and I couldn't find a way to get over it and not to scare any of you but more to say that it like it happens I actually almost failed my chemistry subject and that scared me a lot I'm a big perfectionist so to have that grade come back absolutely scared me and I didn't know how to recover from that so again I went to the science services hub which would have been pointed out to you hopefully on your tours I walked in there and said hey this is what this is what's happened I don't know how to deal with this can you please help me and I live in there and have lived in there pretty much every semester since making sure that I'm at where I want to be and I'm giving myself the opportunities that I want to give myself that and because even though like coming into degrees you guys are looking online and trying to decide what you're trying to do but there's just so much information out there that you don't see it all all at once so going into talk to them actually showed me the breadth of opportunities that I could give myself so coming into that I then decided to choose a bio chemistry major instead of a chemistry major and still keeping my microbiology interest as well and have actually found myself at the moment I'm in the middle I've got three weeks left of a summer research scholarship so because research is something that I feel like I want to go into I know it's not for everyone but it's something lab work is just something there's something in it that just keeps me excited but I've been able to work in one of the labs just behind us in the molecular life sciences building with a malaria researcher there so I've been actually able to utilize all of the skills that I've had in my degree and more that I didn't even know I had and cement those in effort to help even though it's a six-week placement so it's only a very very short amount of time but that shows me and it has shown me and has cemented for me the decision that I'd made when I was this tall that I wanted to go out and help people and fortunately for me I started seeing patterns and I was able to make that decision based on the whole experience so I'm helping actually doing a little bit like research on proteins of the malaria parasite itself which is really really really cool I could go on about it for days but I won't bore you with it all but the main bit of advice that I could give you as students coming in is to make sure that you always say yes never sort of put yourself back I know it's very easy to say no because it's a new it's a new environment it's a new situation but give yourself the opportunity to explore go and join clubs and societies even if you're not sure whether it's going to interest you just go and do it you meet new people you meet new people every day and that's something that I love about uni is that I feel like I've met everyone within my degree but then someone else decides to turn up as well so absolutely love it but the main thing is would be to always say yes I think that's all that I have to say thank you all for your personal testaments and I can assure you that none of them were paid much we're moving to the point where we're going to be able to for you to ask us questions but before we do so we've heard sort of that big picture what I want to do is go through start about the process some of the nitty gritty so much of this you already know but I just want to make sure that we're all speaking the same language so up here we have a list of the degrees on offer in the Faculty of Sciences now the most general degree is the one in the bottom right hand corner that says Bachelor of Science so that that's a degree that you can do any core what you know subjects in year 11 year 12 we call courses here at University you can do any any courses with that as long as you have the prerequisites if necessary but if so if you're not sure what you want to get into what area of specialization like I've just heard some of these these personal accounts where some of them knew what they wanted to get into and some of them found their feet in first year typically that's we find what generally happens but if you think you know exactly what you want to get into then there are what we call these name degrees and they're all the other degrees that are up there so they're already built up with a particular focus in mind you can see that they're based under these subject areas agriculture food wine vet sciences by med sciences etc now as well as the Bachelor of Science you're aware that there's the Bachelor of Science advanced which again is similar is very very general but it has a higher ATAR and the what that allows is what you it allows you to do one subject each year that specifically has a research type focus and although none of the the students spoke about that I'm sure that the advanced students and you advanced in I'm sure you would say that those subjects PPR 2 PPR 3 a wonderful wonderful experiences for everyone everybody loves them now in vision you see that there are some new degrees on offer for 2020 so Bachelor of Applied Data Analytics there's also a direct entry into a Bachelor of Science honours so that's a four-year degree and we've already heard mentioned about honours so that allows you to directly be guaranteed a place in honours there's also a Bachelor of Science advanced honours version as well and also a Bachelor of Veterinary Technology so these are the new degrees so they're all science degrees it's just that some of them are built with a particular focus straight away and you're sort of guided into your your course choice but if you're unsure a Bachelor of Science or a Bachelor of Science advanced is an excellent way to study sciences at the University of Adelaide and to help you with with that that's what we're going to be offering you the opportunity later on for these one-on-one sessions either tonight or or later on so once you're enrolled in one of these particular degrees and so what I forgot to say is when you finally graduate and you go up on the stage of Benyton Hall in your gown and everyone's wearing their finest few people wear shorts these days I've been noticing and shake the vice chancellor's hand he will give you a parchment a testamure and that degree that you've just seen on the previous slide that will be printed on on your testamure in addition what is printed on your testamure is your area of specialisation is what we call a major so this is what you see on the screen now and you can see that it spans all the different sciences there are some things called a single major which means you have one area of specialisation often you'll have two so you might have say biochemistry with chemistry that's a popular one or biochemistry in microbiology and immunology that's another popular combination or they're what we call double major so some of the disciplines like chemistry for example you can just do all of your focus particularly at your third year on one particular sub-discipline of sciences so this is what we mean by now the major and for all of these degrees with I think one exception I can't top my head you must get a major at the end in order for you to get your degree but you don't need to worry about this in first year in first year you're encouraged to be as broad as you can and see what you like and then you start to focus as you progress the second year and to third year okay so this is where we all are at the moment you've all may or may well I think you've all had an offer all the perspective of students at least the data that I've seen so be aware that you only receive one offer per round and you'll get that for the highest preference you qualify for and there are six possible responses that you can make and three three of them are similar in that you're saying that you wish to be considered for higher preferences and for many of you I'm aware that that's what you're considering tonight that you need to wondering if you should accept that offer or can you apply for something else so what you can do is change the order of your preferences so that's something that you can do and you can always leave your options open so you can accept your current offer but you could accept but wish to be considered for higher preferences and then see how you go in the subsequent rounds so your first offer just repeat doesn't need to be your final one you can rearrange your your preferences and if you want to wait for another offer your preferred degree must be a higher preference than the one you receive so you need to adjust your preferences so that it's at a higher offer and if just again to reiterate if you haven't selected wish to be considered for higher preferences you will not receive another offer now if you wait for another offer it won't negatively impact on your potential to enroll in that first offer offering you can still get this this additional offer so there's plenty of time and you see at the bottom of the screen there you see all the rounds that are opening that are open so there's one coming up in a few days time that's why today is strategically placed to be a few days before that that next round if you want to make changes I've been told and you can confirm this with with some of the advisors is that you need to change your preferences by midnight of the 8th have I got that but there's a few nods over there so obviously got that remember that correctly but you see that 10th of Jan 23rd of Jan and then every week from early February until March there's plenty of opportunity for doing this and we know that students prospective students often do change their minds many many times and that's that's fine and fine I just also say that with the Bachelor of Science your ATAR isn't the only way of getting in with the Bachelor of Science there is consideration made of the subjects that you made so what's called subject based admission where it considers your your scores in specifically the sciences and information about that is not up there how will we get information go and see one of the advisors later on okay now much of this has been focused on the prospective students but just about half of you here are the parents and guardians and we know that you've had a tough time to those cranky students wanting to study all the time you've been feeding them closing them giving them as much opportunity to study as possible and encouraging them along the way but you have questions too and tonight is an opportunity for you to ask questions as well you are also welcome into the science services hub so there's a picture of it there it's sort of behind you physically located on campus behind you and up a flight of stairs up the middle of the campus or you can talk to some people tonight there's a hotline there call that if you have any short specific questions or you can also book appointments on the website that you see there now as well as hearing from students or pass students and present students we also have a another team of academics from the other three schools of the faculty of sciences and also some of the administrative staff who work in the faculty office and I'm going to hand over to them for them to introduce themselves and talk a bit about what their areas of specialization are and for all of these people including the students you'll have an opportunity of talking with these people later on so over to you Beth thanks Greg wow it's so good to see you all here I feel like it's a really hard gig to follow these guys though they are amazing and express themselves so amazingly and I thought wow I work at a really cool place so as the slide says my name is Beth Lovies I work out at the Wake campus I am a plant physiologist by training but converted my position here at the University of Adelaide to an education specialist in 2015 so that means that I am a teaching only academic so my role is really to translate all the amazing research that happens at the university into language which I can then teach to our students working at the weight is amazing the first slide that Greg showed about food production that just says it all really our students are there to learn about how to grow food how to grow food better how to grow food smarter and another one of those fantastic statistics that Greg had up on one of those slides about jobs for our graduates our graduates I have not known of a single graduate since I started work in 2011 at the Wake campus who has not had a job before they finished their degree and usually they've got three or four that they're picking and choosing from so that's a pretty amazing position for a newly graduated student to be in by the end of their degree so I teach into the Bachelor of Ag and the Bachelor of Viticulture and Anology and also the Bachelor of Food and Nutrition Science one of the really lovely things about the Wake campus is that it is slightly smaller than North Terrace so I get to know every single one of my students mostly I can remember their name sometimes not quite but mostly I remember their name and we have a have a really close-knit community at the at the Wake campus I'll be around after you've had a chance to ask these guys some questions so if anyone's considering doing a Bachelor of Ag, Bachelor of Viticulture or Bachelor of Food and Nutrition Science I would be more than happy to chat to you out the front later on so thank you yeah my name's Dan Pete and I'm in the School of Biological Sciences I'm also a biochemist you've heard a bit about biochemists who thinks they know what a biochemist is no we've got at least one I'm not even sure what I do I think we're people who can't decide whether we're biologists or chemists so we sit somewhere in the middle as a biochemist I have a fairly standard academic position part of my role is to do research does anyone know what the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology was awarded for last year no one you're gonna have to go home and look that up it was in how cells sense oxygen in the body particularly low oxygen and how that relates to human disease that's my area of research sadly I didn't win a Nobel Prize but it really is quite a topical area of research I have a number of roles in the school one is the head of learning and teaching so in charge of learning and teaching for all of our different degrees and programs and they include the Bachelor of Science in Marine Biology, Bachelor of Science in Wildlife Conservation Biology and we've heard about that, Bachelor of Science in Biotechnology and the last one is the Bachelor of Science in Biomedical Science and I'm actually the program coordinator of the Biomedical Science degree as well so if you've got any questions about that afterwards please feel free to come and ask me in our school we also cover a number of other majors areas like ecology which covers things like zoology and botany spatial science evolutionary biology biochemistry genetics microbiology and immunology as we've heard and our most recent or newest major a new one this year is in bioinformatics really understanding and and analyzing very large biological data sets things like for example the human genome sequences where you've got three billion base pairs of information from hundreds or thousands of individuals so it's working out how to deal with those data the other couple of ones the the new degree we've just heard a little bit about was the Bachelor of Applied Data Analytics we have two sort of specializations there as well in the school one in bioinformatics again and the second one is in environment so a range of majors and a range of different degrees so once again if you have any questions about that please come up and ask in terms of advice for students about to commence you've had some great advice once again from the students here I can't add much to that I would say a couple of things one is really try and enjoy yourself in first year there's a lot of things to experience at university make the most of those and enjoy and the second is breadth science is important you've heard about that tonight but it's not the only thing so you do have opportunity to study in other areas and other subjects as well so particularly in first year make the most of those hello everyone my name is Kapil I am from the School of Animal and Wet Sciences which is based at Roseworthy I came to Australia in 2005 I did my wet degree from India and then I did my PhD and membership exam in Australia so I'm a veterinarian by by profession my first experience after coming to Australia on very first day in India people ask you how do you do how are you doing and on very first day when I came to Australia someone said how are you going and I said I'm going by bus the reason I'm telling that to you is is as a teacher at Roseworthy we not only just teach students we also try and to communicate them in their language and which is very important as a teacher at Roseworthy campus you can look at all the information in the booklet but we teach well about to teach the fourth new course veterinary technology we teach bachelor of animal science there is Amy just talked about her experience of studying animal behavior there is bachelor's in veterinary bioscience and there is doctor of veterinary medicine we call DVM I'm very proud to say that I'm part of a wet school which is ranked in top 50 in the world now a lot of you are your 12 students and parents there are students in different categories I'm I'm I have a huge respect for for students who are very determined and know what they are going to do in their life I was not one of them I was very confused when I was in year 12 and it is okay to be confused there is nothing wrong to be confused but for choosing a science all what I'm going to say is if you would like to learn a new technology and help community help human health and help animals there is a bit of a scientist in you there's a bit of a science in you and that's where you can make a choice of selecting any science based degree if you would like to have more information about what we offer at Roseworthy so just like as bed said at Roseworthy it's much smaller compared to North Terrace we are close-knit community you will find less number of students just stuck to their mobile phones at Roseworthy we do talk to each other quite a bit we do prefer communicating face-to-face rather than through social media but that doesn't mean to say that we do not use social media we do use that as well but we do try to remember I can't remember name of every single student but we do have pictures of every single student so we one of our strength is a small-sized class at Roseworthy and because of the small-sized class we are able to work individually with students we have a number of internships we have a large number of almost all of our students who are able to find a job by the time they finish their degree so there are a lot of strengths and a lot of unique opportunities at Roseworthy campus if you have specific questions about careers in in any of the animal related area including wet science admissions and other questions I'll be around so feel free to ask questions in the best interest of time I'm gonna be very brief and hand over to Liz next but I'm happy to ask answer questions afterwards thank you Hi everyone so my name is Liz I work in the future student team so if you ever had any questions leading up to this about entry requirements or pathways into uni or how to apply you probably spoke to myself or one of my colleagues if you do have any questions about your preferences or you haven't quite got the offer that you want or you want to change things around even bridging courses I'm happy to have a chat afterwards and and I look forward to meeting you all. Hi all I'm Roy Ciceri this is my colleague Sharon Kildare we are student advisors and we're located in the site services hub over in the Darling building on ground floor basically we're the first point of contact for any student related inquiries that you may have whether it's study plan advice or enrolment advice exchange inquiries etc so our office hours are Monday to Friday from 9 to 5 so don't be afraid to come and see us or even just to pop in and say hi thank you. Okay all of these people are available to answer questions we have two mics including quite literally a throw mic so I've probably got under 10 minutes if there are any questions of a sort of a general nature and I can throw to any of any of the panel does anyone have a question don't be shy if it from the students how welcoming we are is one down here just wait a little bit get to the mic to you please. After an honours year do many students continue to study or do most enter the workforce? I think I know that fairly well so it depends on which discipline area so in some areas it could be a very high proportion so I know in physics for example a very high proportion of students once they finish their bachelor's degree will go on to honours it's also possible to go straight into what's called an M fill no honours route so that's a two-year degree and that's considered as a higher degree of research I mean other areas where there's a real pool for jobs and perhaps I'm wondering perhaps how so certainly the physical sciences I'd say it would range between about 30% to about 90% of the students would go on. I would say in my the degrees that I'm involved in Bachelor of Ag and Bachelor of Culture and Anology honours is actually quite rare we certainly have honours students and there is an honours program but most of our students are fully equipped to go into their chosen field after their standard undergraduate bachelor's degree. Dan did you want to say something about biological sciences? Yeah biological sciences would be somewhere in between so certainly a reasonable portion maybe 20 or 30% would go on and do honours and then some of those would go on to further study as well. Okay so my my answer to that question is in two parts so firstly for veterinary science there is no specific honours so vet science is a six years course so first segment is three years of vet by science and then three years of doctor of veterinary medicine which is DVM so there is no specific honours but if someone is is dedicated to be a scientist after finishing six years of vet degree our large proportion of graduates they work in practice after finishing a vet degree. I did the same but for animal behavior animal science about 20 to 30% of students prefer to do honours but that is not an absolute requirement a lot of our students particularly animal science students are able to get or secure a job without doing honours as well. Okay yeah thanks everyone. Another question sorry for being so brusque but I want to get through as many questions as possible you get a chance to speak into that phone box. Yes Ella mentioned that she found past sessions invaluable what are past sessions? So sorry I touched on that as mine as well so it's on peer assisted study sessions so it's where you have a student that's so safe it's safe I'm doing first year geology it'll be a second or a third year geology student or even an honours student someone that's already done that course and they come in into a small room and they go through questions with you so I did it especially for geology in my first year before a test I would go into a past session and we'd run through practice tests and if there was concepts I think it would be especially good for stuff like maths if there's a concept that you don't understand you have someone that's probably a little bit closer in age to you to your lecturers and it's a smaller group than a lecture theatre so it's just more of that classroom learning to build on concepts and go through stuff to make you more confident. I'll just add to that that the past leaders as we call them so the senior students who are running those sessions are really highly trained they have to have excelled in that particular course and then they have specific training to help the more junior students to understand complex problems so it's sort of it's a fairly rigorous system to get into to be a past leader and be part of the past program. All right any other questions? No one wants a box thrown at them? Oh there's one over there. Thank you. About how much of the courses are now online or delivered online and how much will be face-to-face? Okay so there's now is this true faculty guide certainly now school as a requirement that all lectures are recorded and I think that's true pretty much across the university now often quizzes now are online so you might be given either a few days or a week to do them so some of the assessment is going online. In sciences is there anyone that doesn't have exams any courses that don't I'm not aware certainly in chemistry we still have exams although it's it depends on how much it's worth for the course but it's certainly not significant anymore I mean I guess in the olden days it was 80% of but it's more like cheese final exam thinking my feet typically foot 30 40 50% it really depends on the course but there is a move for a lot of online content and the students touched on it one of the disappointing things for me as an academic is I really think I'm a good lecturer and it's very disappointing when I have a class say in the Braggs lecture theater and a fraction of the students would turn up and I would put a lot of effort into designing and trying to make an entertaining course so what was said before is take take advantage of the lectures you really do learn a lot and I think that experience that live experience where you can interact with the lecturer you do get more out of it then simply just watching a recorded lecture online but the students don't seem to be listening to me just a couple of things to add to that we do have some courses that have no exams so we do continuous assessment but the other major thing I think that separates many of the science areas from other parts of the university is practicals and those practicals are often hands-on in the laboratories above us so where a lot of the practicals take place and they are compulsory so there still is even with online material where many students don't turn up to lectures there's certainly aspects where students are still required to attend and I think they're very important aspects. Thanks Dan. I will just quickly say kind of related to you if you don't go to lectures especially in chemistry you won't get to see Greg's cool science experiments the better in person trust me but I will say just quickly that I find more value coming into lectures because everybody says yeah I'll watch them online don't worry I'll do it later you never do so it's best to be there and put yourself in that situation sit there and listen and go back online and recap everything you've made miss something during that that that time period go back and re-watch the lecture don't use unless you've got legitimate reason don't go back and just use that as your only source of lecture content you get more out of it by being there. Alright thanks Ella. Alright we have one more question. It's not really a question it's actually a bit of a statement can I just start to tell you that I'm actually a mature age student here I came back well I came back to university a lot older I'm a nurse by profession and then decided I there was always something that I wanted to do not in sciences but that's not the point my son is here doing a science degree finally got in so I just want to say to you about the things of lectures what I've learned is the most invaluable thing is that these professors that I'm doing law and politics put time into your lectures and probably the way there's nothing like coming to a lecture and being lectured to by someone who is it motivates you to actually and spurs you to actually want to be going on and then if you if you don't go trying to actually catch up and sit down and going through some people with some go through two three four hours of lectures is actually quite gruelling and I don't think you get as much out of it so I can say anything to any of these students I know you sort of think oh god another lecture I don't really have to go I can listen to online but I do say to you from someone who's a mature age student who's only been at university here for a couple years and I was in your position a couple of years ago I was overwhelmed and absolutely beside myself but the best thing that ever happened to me a lot of the lecturers the professors they're approachable but please do attend the lectures because I think you get a lot more out of it than trying to sit and then do a catch up online it just doesn't happen at the risk of sounding like a broken record you get like lecture that is as big as this but your lecturers will remember your face so if you're one of those people that comes to lectures you can bet that when you go for references at the end of your degree your lecturers and your demonstrators and your course coordinators are gonna say I remember that kid he was one of five people that showed up to my lectures for the whole three years and my course is fairly small and my lecturers know when I'm not there and I get emails about it so I definitely would recommend and of course if I didn't go to any lectures and I wouldn't have that kind of relationship with my academic staff and I wouldn't feel accountable so I just yeah it's not just the fact of catching up with lectures and that you obviously do learn a lot better from being in lectures but it's the relationships that you build from them as well which are really overlooked and if I could go back to my first year I would probably attend quite a few more lectures all right we have to draw the public Q&A session to a close now I just want to say a few more things and then we're going to have an opportunity for you to talk to come and talk to either the students Ben here any of the academics and also the advisors as well so so this is really a repeat of what we've seen this will be the last slide we'll leave it up there we are here to help the Faculty Sciences Hub located in the Faculty of Sciences office is a very welcoming place and it's filled with knowledgeable people who will bend over backwards you've heard that to help you out you can contact us online email phone or obviously tonight as well something hasn't been mentioned is scholarships there are scholarships available for students if you're interested please have a look at the the webpage that's listed up there and I remind you all that with your offers if you don't have the offer you want right now there is still plenty of opportunity to change that so I've just left


Good evening to all and thank you all for coming for this fifth annual lecture of the Center for Palestine Studies at SOAS. My name is Gilbert Ashkar and I'm the chair of the center, being the chair of the center for the last six years that is since its foundation and that's actually my practically my last or before the last meeting as chair of the Center for Palestine Studies. There's one more activity coming next week in which I'll be also chairing in this capacity. After that I'm stepping down because we have two mandates and someone else will be replacing me as a chair of the center. So this is a special moment for an annual lecture for a Center for Palestine Studies. This year as you know is the 70th, the year of the 70th anniversary of the Nakba or of the also foundation of the state of Israel which is connected to what the Palestinians and the Arabs call the Nakba and in, sorry but the event is recorded and filmed so you will find everything online please no recording and no filming because these things should be authorized in advance when people need to film. That's why we have to refuse a request for filming, sorry for that but it will be online you will see the whole lecture and this introduction. So I was saying that this is the 70th anniversary of the Nakba and indeed it would be difficult to find a more appropriate speaker on this occasion than Elias Khouri and I'm very happy to welcome Elias who's an old friend for me who are both from the same country from Lebanon. Elias is someone who has been very intimately linked to the Palestinian issue or the Palestinian cause I should say and the Nakba in particular is a central theme of his work and in particular two of his major novels Gate of the Sun which has been translated and published in English a few years ago and his very last one Ghetto's Children or Children of the Ghetto depending on translation which will be coming out very soon. These are among the novels that deal with the theme of the Nakba and which is also the theme of many of the other writings of Elias which are not only novels and literature. And I should say there's a further reason why probably Elias Khouri is a very appropriate person to speak of this theme. He is born the year of the Nakba 1948 so that's also an anniversary that for him means I'm sure a lot. Now Elias Khouri as I just hinted at is a personality with very multiple dimension in terms of production. There's Elias Khouri the writer, the novelist, the best known at least in the western world the best known aspect of Elias Khouri. There's Elias Khouri the academic and Elias Khouri the political activist turned public intellectual with age and status. So let me speak a little bit about these various facets of Elias's personality. As for the political activist turned public intellectual Elias has been involved since his youth in the Palestinian national movement actually he even joined the Palestinian national movement early on and it's been, I mean the issue of Palestine has been his really life concern and life theme. He was also prominent in Lebanon as an intellectual but through a very important role also he played as the editor of the cultural supplement of one of the key main newspapers in Lebanon which became under his editorial chip a political organ in addition to the very important cultural role that this played. And Elias was one of the figures or let me say this way why one of the left wing figures along with Samir Qasir of whom some of you I guess may have heard or known who were involved in the popular uprising against the Syrian regime's domination over Lebanon in the year 2005. Samir Qasir the person whom I just named and who's a very close friend of Elias was assassinated was the first in a series of people assassinated after the uprising not to mention the fact that the uprising was in reaction initially to the assassination of the former prime minister of Lebanon Rafiq Khalili. The academic well Elias is not only a writer of actually is also a playwright is a novelist but someone who writes about literature and a literary critic he has books several books works of literary criticism and he has taught I mean when I say academic it's in the very literal sense he has taught at various universities in New York at Columbia University and at the NYU New York University and he used to spend every year a few months in New York for his teaching understood from him that this stopped now and he taught also at the American University of Beirut at the Lebanese American University and the Lebanese University the public university of Lebanon. The third aspect of the third facet of Elias the novelist is something that is beyond my competence I'm no specialist of literature but for this I asked my colleague Professor Wenxin Uyong to present the this dimension which is a very important dimension of Elias Huri's work and production a few words about Wenxin. She was born in Taiwan and raised in Libya and she is therefore she defines herself as a native speaker of Arabic and Chinese. She completed her PhD at Columbia and actually that's where she came to know Elias and she's not the only person here in this room who has known Elias as a lecturer at Columbia. And she taught at Columbia before and other places before coming here she's the author of several books on literary criticism on the Arabic novel various dimensions of the Arabic novel so she's a very appropriate person to present our guest please Wenxin. Good evening everyone. It is my great pleasure and indeed great great honor to be given an opportunity to say a few words about our guest of honor our keynote speaker Elias Huri ahead of the center for Palestine Studies annual lecture on the Nakaba in the present. He is I am sure known to you already as an avant-garde Beiruti cosmopolitan intellectual writer and critic whose 13 novels are today available in 15 languages and more importantly in tonight's context he is a staunch supporter of Palestine and the Palestinians. His commitment to enroll in the Palestinian cause are well known in 1967 as a 19 year old Elias traveled to Jordan where he visited a Palestinian refugee camp and enlisted in Fatah the largest resistance organization in the Palestinian liberation organization. He left Jordan after thousands of Palestinians were killed or expelled in the wake of an attempted coup against King Hussein known as Black September from 1975 to 1979 to 1975 to 1979 Huri was editor of Shoeun Palestine Palestinian affairs collaborating with Mahmoud Darwish from 1981 to 1982 he was editorial director of Alkarman his Palestinian experience and its intersection with post-colonial Arab and international politics including the several Lebanese civil war between 1975 and 1990 would become the focus of his novels for example in his 1998 seminal novel on the Palestinian exodus by Bishams beautifully translated into English by Humphrey Davis Humphrey Davis as the Gate of the Sun which came out in 2006 this one is an uncompromising retelling of the story of their traumatic loss and experience of statelessness homelessness and exile the Gate of the Sun I am told is the only Arabic novel that sells well in English it has been made into a film a very long one I might add by eminent Egyptian director Yusri Nasrallah in 2003 I'm sure it has been partaking in making known to the world the plight of the Palestinians since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1949 48 sorry but tonight I want to go against the grain of his lecture on Daganakba in the present and say more about his impact on generations of young scholars of Arabic literature in North America and Europe these include local scholars and Arab scholars who for one reason or another ended up in places like Columbia University or New York University where Elias also taught I do this very briefly I will start with the specificity of my personal experience then branch out to address his more global impact around an axis of three intersexting issues that have a relevance to how we do Palestine studies and more particularly Palestinian literature here at so as these issues are one what and how to teach modern Arabic literature in the US and European academic institutions which number two are in exorbitantly connected with Orientalism and I hear and here I mean the established paradigms in US and academic academic institutions for the study of the non-European cultural and literary production and three the relationship between academic pursuits and activism. I melt Elias Khoury possibly in 1985 I can't be sure for now through a fellow PhD student Samah Idris when I was an impressionable Chinese from Taiwan Libyan who three years into her PhD studies was completely disillusioned by Columbia University's Arabic literature program and I'll explain the existing structures did not allow me to pursue Arabic and Chinese comparative literature the curriculum impart pre-modern Arabic did not include Arabic critical thought and theory and the curriculum in modern stop at the generation of Taha Hussein and Al-Aqqat. I was more particularly disillusioned by the academic and interpersonal politics. Edward Said's 1978 Orientalism had yet to have an impact on Arabic Islamic and Middle Eastern studies even at Columbia University. When Samah Idris arrived at Columbia University from Beirut he brought a revolution with him. He fought for contemporary writers to be read and discuss at the modern Arabic literature graduate seminars and he played a key role in organizing events to which key Palestinian and pro-Palestinian writers and intellectuals were invited such as Emil Habibi, Anton Shamas and of course Ilyas Khoury. These intellectuals were invited to speak and address the American public. I have known Ilyas Khoury and his works for more than 30 years now. I have not been privileged enough to be a member of his entourage and in Lebanese Irta has two meanings the classical sort of entourage and the more popular gang. Yeah but I have benefited a great deal from being around them being antisocial and classically inclined. I prefer to hang out with the dead on a good day but on a bad day I'm always happy to be dragged along to go start chasing. Reading Khoury's novels such as Little Mountain which came out in 1977, White Mask my favorite 1981 and The Journey of Little Gandhi 1989 opened my eyes to the beauty intellectual rigor and innovations of the contemporary Arabic novel and its expensive global horizon that goes beyond let us say the influence of North America Western Europe. We need not wait for the critical establishment which is invested in all sorts of ideological and political interests to decide for us what to read and what to teach. Reading his classical, sorry, reading his critical essays such as Dirasat in Naqad Al-Shahr, Studies in Critics in Critique of Poetry 1979, Adzakir al-Maf'udah, Lost Memory 1982, Tajribat al-Bahat an-Ufuk, Experimenting with Searching for Horizon 1984 and Zaman al-Ihtila, The Time or Period of Occupation 1985 and those published in As-Safir where he served as the editor of the cultural section, Mulhaq Taqafi between 1983 and 1990 first and later since its revival after the Civil War. So reading those and listening to him talk about genealogies and new directions of Arabic narrative at graduate seminars, memorably hearing Elias dismissing the Maqamad and championing the Thousand and One Night, Alif Leila Walayla and hearing him debate the role of literature in national and international politics at conferences on the Arabic novel, memorably his exchange with Huda Barakat in Paris where Elias went for we want to liberate Palestine and Huda went for we want to put bread on the table. Hearing all this, right, taught me two lessons. One, that the classical is always present and must necessarily be seen through the prism of the modern and for me to understand the classical I must understand my position in the present. And two, that we can be both scholar and activist at the same time that our activism need not compromise our critical stance and perhaps above all that Palestine is present and everywhere when we think about the Arab world, Arab culture and Arabic literature today. His most recent novel, Children of the Geto, My Name is Adam, which came out in 2016 once again epitomizes his position as writer, critic and activist. Right, and I understand that the English translation by Humphrey Davis will be coming out in a few months. So as such, Elias is a specter in the curriculum and ethos of Palestine studies and Arabic literature at SOAS. It is indeed our great fortune that the real flesh and blood Elias Khouri is here to talk to us tonight. So please help me give him our warmest welcome. Thank you very much Wenchin. There will be some time, limited time, but there will be some time for Q and A's at the end of the lecture. Please. Mr. Khair, good evening everybody. Thank you Gilbert. Thank you Wenchin. Actually, I have said is a huge burden. I hope that I deserve a little bit of it at least. And thank you Gilbert for and the Center for Palestine Studies for inviting me here for two reasons. First, because it gave me the opportunity to meet all of you. And second, because it gave me the opportunity to go through this nightmare of the British visa, which is something becoming something unbelievable for someone like me coming from where I come from. So with this, I will begin and the title of my presentation is Nakba the Memory and the Present. One of the most significant moments in my life was in January 2014 when a group of about 200 young Palestinian men and women captured a piece of land in the outskirts of East Jerusalem and built a village of tents. The land, this land was confiscated by the Israeli occupation and was named Area E1. And it was designed to build a new Jewish settlement in the occupied Palestinian land. The young liberators of this piece of land named their new village, Bab Shams, Gate of the Sun. And the destiny of the village unfortunately was not different from the destinies of hundreds of Palestinian villages that were destroyed and bulldozed by the occupying Israeli army. The village survived three days and after its brutal destruction, it was recreated three times with different names and destroyed three times. The last village to be destroyed carried the name the grandsons of Yunis. Yunis is the main protagonist of a novel published in 1998 in Beirut entitled the Gate of the Sun. The novel narrates the stories of the Palestinian Nakba of 1948 and it is the story of a lover who spent his life as an infiltrator crossing the Palestinian border from Lebanon in order to meet Nahila, his wife and lover who stayed in the Galilee. And it happened that I signed this novel. The most interesting aspect of this political cultural event was not only the fact that the imaginary became a reality and that the real simulates literature and reproduces it, but also the fact that these young activists were facing the Nakba with their will. They declared the fact not realized by the majority of Arab and Palestinian intellectuals that the Nakba which began in 1948 is still taking place today. The Nakba is the present and not history. In 2011 I gave a lecture in the School of Advanced Studies in Berlin entitled the Continuous Nakba and to my amazement the debate that followed concentrated not on denying the Nakba as usual the way the dominant Israeli discourse insisted on for so long, but to challenge the idea of the Nakba as a process that never stopped since 1948. Because this hypothesis will daily legitimize the whole Zionist project and shed a light on its nature as a classical settler colonial project that have its roots in the European colonial project of the 19th and early 20th century. Edward Said in his book The Question of Palestine wrote an excellent analysis of the colonial roots of the Zionist project and read it with a theoretical approach he formulated in his masterpiece Orientalism. What the young founders of the village, Babish Shams proved with their intuition and sense of survival was the obvious. They realized from their daily life experience under occupation that they are living under a daily existential threat that no discourse of peace or absurd negotiations about a two-state solution can cover. They are a people that must disappear or to use the Israeli juridical innovation they are present absence. The idea that perplexed me while working on my novel The Children of the Geto is this fascinating and vague concept that was formulated by the Israeli law about the present absence. This concept was designated to define the status of the Palestinians that stayed in their homeland which will become Israel. Those of them that lost their properties by law because they were displaced from their villages or cities by the occupying forces and found refuge in other places inside what will become Israel were given the name of the present absence. On the other hand those who were forced to live for neighboring countries Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza were given the title of absence and their properties were confiscated as being absentees properties. If you were a Palestinian after the war of the Nakba of 1948 you are either a present absent or an absent. You didn't lose only your land and property but you have lost your name also. I can realize the meaning of being absent but the term absent present seems totally irrational for me. How can one be absent and present in the same time? When I first encountered this term I thought that it is a literary metaphor and it fits a title of a novel written by Kafka. Probably this will be the title of the third volume of my trilogy The Children of the Geto but I realized that this term became a juridical term in the only democracy of the Middle East and the Israeli institution applied it by the force of law. Thus the Palestinians of Israel became the first literary character in history that was not created by novelists or poets and they illustrated concretely that the wild imaginary of the oppressors can be much more sophisticated than the imagination of writers. Being absent or present absent means that you are invisible. This invisibility is reflected in the Israeli literature through the nonexisting Palestinian and or through immute Palestinian shadow or a nomad or a child. This amazing fact is clear in the post-state literature where the Palestinian is pushed to become a present absent, where the Palestinian is pushed to become a present absent when we rarely encounter him in Israeli novels. The most significant representation of the Palestinian was written by the Israeli novelist S. Yizhar in his novella Khirbet Khaza 1949 where the Israeli author creates the character of the Palestinian as a shadow during the occupation and destruction of a Palestinian village in Southern Palestine. The interesting approach in this masterpiece is the introduction of the Palestinians as the Jews of the Jews. Analysis of the way the novel describes the Palestinian villagers will take us directly to the anti-Semitic European vocabulary used to describe the Jew. The great moment of revelation in this novel comes when the author brings Jeremiah to his contemplations. I quote, I wanted to discover if among all these people there was a single Jeremiah mourning and burning, forging a mouth of fury in his heart, crying out in stiff tones to the old God in heaven atop the trucks of exile. End of quote. The Jew of the Jew was to be recreated as a shadow in Amoos Ozes, My Michael, or a mute Arab, even when he exists as a teenager like Naeem in Aleppo Yahushua's The Lover, or as a mythical magical character, Helmi, in Grossman's Smile of the Lamb. He is in these three novels a literary solution to the problems of the Israeli Jewish characters. What's amazing is that this image of the Palestinian mute child will become a paradigm in the Israeli literature and will be reproduced recently by a young writer, Alon Hulu, who is of Syrian origin in his novel The Rajani House, 2008, where we meet Salah Rajani, a troubled Palestinian boy who suffered from a vision of the coming Palestinian disaster. The boy is like the Arab in Yahushua's facing the forests, unable to speak, and his visions, although revealed through writing, are non-said. With the occupation of the West Bank and Raza and Jerusalem in 1967, the invisible will become visible. The Palestinians are here and no one can deny their existence. Thus the strategy of the continuous Nakba was to push them towards the fate of the Palestinians designed by Israel as invisibles. The destiny of the present is to become absent. This is the guideline of the Israeli strategy in the occupied territories, and this is implemented in a very long and sophisticated project. Through one, the bypass roads, where a visitor to Israel can go to the settlements of the West Bank without seeing any Palestinian. The Palestinian towns and villages are covered to the extent that they became nearly invisible. Two, the racist separation wall, which separates and confiscates lands, transforming Palestinian cities into prisons in the open air. Three, the checkpoints that destroy life and make circulation a difficult job, if not impossible. Four, the settler enclaves inside the Palestinian neighborhoods, mainly in Jerusalem and Hebrew. Fifth, the siege of Gaza, which created the biggest ghetto prison in the world. These elements are crowned by the law of nationality, which will give legitimacy to an apartheid Jewish state named Israel. The Palestinians must disappear, and the visible must vanish. I never understood the puzzles of the Zionist project, till while working on the second volume of my novel, The Children of the Ghetto, I came across two shocking terms. Sabunim and Muselmaner. Sabunim became widely used shortly after the establishment of the Jewish state. It pointed to the survivors of the Holocaust who had made their way to the promised land. This pejorative term carries dual meanings. A metaphoric allusion to cowardice and a literal meaning deriving from the origin of the word sabun, meaning soap, found in both Arabic and Hebrew languages. This is a reference to one of the alleged barbaric practices of the Nazi Holocaust, which was to produce soap from the bodies of its victims, an unfounded claim which was held by many as true at that time.  How can you understand these two terms, Sabunim and Muslims? I was faced with the ambiguity of soap for the first time when visiting an installation by the Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum at the Arab World Institute in Paris in 1996. She had created a cartographer's map from 2,400 blocks of the famous Nablus soap clearly etched with the borders of the Israeli occupation in Palestine. The heavy aroma of the Nablus soap had permitted the open areas and corridors of the Arab World Institute and had captured all my senses. My own interpretation of the artist's interesting choice of material was that the very smell of soap made from Palestinian olive oil should represent the antithesis to the occupation and that the smell of the land should ultimately be able to overcome the violence, the borders and occupation.  On being confronted with this interpretation of the Palestinian artist's work, I became at a loss at the way to find a common understanding of terminology between victim and oppressor. Indeed, does a possibility of discovering a common vocabulary exist? If the Palestinian artist is not to be allowed to use Nablus soap for fear of stirring up a Zionist interpretation of her art that destroys the very essence of its humanity, how then are Palestinians to express their tragedy? Or must their tragedy be obliterated because a more tragic narrative was crafted in the gas chambers of a racist Europe? Must victims be further victimized by silencing their voices and enforcing their acceptance of their gradual elimination by those who claim to be the very descendants of the victims of the Holocaust? In this case, what is the true meaning of the word Sabunim that became prevalent in Israel? How can a true understanding of its multiple meanings be reached? The other term, Muslims, is now a blanket term used to paint every Muslim and Arab as a potential terrorist amid the reemergence of racism and fascism in the world. Consequently, a heavy task of humiliation and death must be levied by the collective Muslim and Arab worlds. In the death camps of the Nazis, the world had an entirely different meaning. It was used to indicate that the Muslims is marked for elimination. There, on the verge of imminent death, the meanings of words become confused. In fact, words lose all meaning because the silence of the victim becomes the only language befitting the horror of genocide. I do not want to analyze these two terms. I merely mentioned them to point out that miscomprehension is a defining facet of language. The assertion that language is a means of communication is merely an assumption that highlights only one function of language. In fact, language also creates a spectrum of nuances for the meaning of words such that oftentimes the implicit is more significant than the apparent. In Arabic, the Arab linguist of old referred the verb to speak in Arabic to its root, kalama, which translates to the verb to wound. Intimating that a world is a wound to the soul, we must therefore probe the true meaning of words through the association between the wounds they inflict and human suffering. Similarly, the terms Holocaust and Nakba are both surrounded by a shroud of ambiguity. While the term Holocaust or Shoah, which is used to describe the catastrophe inflicted on Jews by the Nazi death camps of World War II, has become an accepted term by historians and academia in general, there remain some voices that either deny its very existence or cast suspicious over the number of its victims. These voices may be currently inconsequential, but they embody a worrying trend accompanying the rise of the fascist right in Europe and the United States. It carries within it the seeds of a new anti-Semitism which may take on several forms of which Islamophobia is but one. On the other hand, the term Nakba, which is used to describe the catastrophe of the Palestinians, suffered many interpretations. The term which was coined by Konstantin Israel, the Damaskin historian in 1948, was not easily assimilated into Arab vocabulary and has only now taken its place as an autonomous definition of the Palestinian tragedy. Despite the current acceptance of the defining term, Israeli law prevents the Palestinian victims residing in Israel from commemorating the Nakba.  We may need to search for the birth of anti-Semitism among the pages of the historians, of the historians' records, of the crusades, or those of the Spanish Inquisition following the Reconquista of Andalusian Spain. However, anti-Semitism reached its pinnacle with the barbaric, final solution that the Nazis tried to implement in Europe. The Palestinian Nakba is linked to a different historic phenomenon defined by European expansionist colonization. The civilizing mission resulted in the colonizing of wide regions, particularly in Africa, spreading from Algeria and the north through Rhodesia and South Africa. The Zionist project was according to its founding fathers a part of this phenomenon. It's true that the starting point of the founding fathers of the National Jewish Project was the anti-Semitic reality that led mainly to the pogroms in Eastern Europe in the 19th century. But their answer to the permitting anti-Semitism was not the only or inevitable one. Jewish options spanned national cultural integration such as the Bund. Another option was the rejection of the idea of a national state as endorsed by the Orthodox Jewish currents because according to them it contradicted Jewish religious beliefs. A third option was total integration as advocated by the adherents of liberalism and Marxism. Only at a larger stage and in conjunction with the British mandate in Palestine after World War I did the Zionist option overpower the other possibilities and became concrete after World War II. However, the Zionist option remained faithful to its colonialist beginnings. It was concurrently a national project as well as a colonial enterprise wherein lies its inherent contradiction which bears no resolution. In all probability, the fusion of the Holocaust and the Zionist project was the one myth on which the state of Israel built its legitimacy and which continues to be the weapon of choice in the face of anti-Criticism leveled at it. The mere mention of Israeli inhuman practices, illegal settlements in the West Bank, the siege of Gaza or the systematic ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem produces loud laments of anti-Criticism made possible by the alchemy of linguistic equivocation. The Palestinians refrained from utilizing the term Holocaust to describe their own catastrophe and use different terminology for the purpose. This is further indication if one is necessary of the essential difference the two historical events in both the circumstances surrounding them and in what they signify. Even though some Israeli practices may take us back to those of the Nazis, it's a mistake to fall into the trap of making such comparison as it would only lead to obscuring issues that color the present. This is an error committed by many Israelis, Jews, Palestinians and Arabs and is no less grave than the mistaken belief by some of the Palestinian leaderships in the 40s of last century that the enemy of their enemy is their friend thereby committing the gratefully of cooperating with the Nazis. Refusing to fall in the trap of such a comparison is a crucial not only because of the enormity of the pure evil created by the Nazi horror machine but also because of the inherent difference between the two events. The Holocaust as a major episode in human history highlights the ever-present possibility of sliding into racism. It ought to be a continuous reminder for the whole of the human race of the importance of standing vigil against the insidious encroachment of racism and of refuting its very assumption. The NAKBA on the other hand is the embodiment of the colonial expansionist reality that gave birth to the upper tide regime in South Africa, causing people everywhere to unite in the struggle against this regime led by the African National Congress in South Africa and culminating in its eradication. The Holocaust and the NAKBA are similar in that they are both relevant to the essential struggle of humanity against racism. The necessity for the memory of the Holocaust to survive as a collective human memory is only made possible by adopting a solid stance against expansionist colonial occupation of which Israel is the last remaining grand part in today's world. Do we stand facing two memories that are in need of being harmonized? Addressing the NAKBA as a memory is a trap that many may fall into regardless of becoming a collective human memory that must be preserved and whose lessons must be internalized. It was a barbaric event that took place in a recent past, in that sense has become part of history and an inescapable truth embedded in the collective human psyche. It must be protected from Holocaust deniers or those that attempt to use it to excuse any form of oppression, ethnic cleansing and racism. The NAKBA is an inherently different issue. The NAKBA's initial bloodshed chapters were written with the forceful ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948. Yet during the Oslo Accords between the Palestinians and the Israelis in 1993, the NAKBA appeared almost like a neveless memory that was put to rest by both parties through mutual compromises. However, it was the very Oslo Accords that proved to be a mirage because they were understood differently by each party. The Palestinians understood it to be the end point to the occupation of the West Bank Jerusalem and Raza as well as the starting point for the establishment of their own state on 20 percent of their historic homeland. The Israeli establishment understood it to be a compromise that would allow them to continue to build settlements and to annex Palestinian land in exchange for allowing Palestinians the right to remain on part of their land and to self-rule over the affairs of their designated Bandostans. This proves the error of some Arab historians who consider the NAKBA a historic event whose place is set firmly in the past. The everyday reality of life in Palestine clearly indicates that the 1948 war was merely the beginning of the catastrophic event that did not end when the ceasefire agreements of 1949 were signed. In fact, 1948 was the beginning that continues to this day. The debate around the existence of a master plan for the expulsion of Palestinians must now be approached differently, particularly as Walid Khalidi conclusively proved the existence of such a plan, Dalit, which was re-iterated by Ilan Papeh in his book The Ethnic Princing of Palestine. The expulsion of Palestinians from the villages and towns in 1948 does not give Israel the right to deny them return and to confiscate their homes and their lands under the pretext that these are absentee properties. The absentee's property law that reach peace of absurdity by referring to the present absent person is in fact worse than the act of expulsion because it transforms the expulsion from an event to a continuous state. Suffice it to study the events surrounding what is referred to as the uprooted villages within the borders of Israel, such as Safuria, whose tragedy was described by its great poet, Taha Muhammad Ali, to understand that the Nakba is a continuing story. The inhabitants of Safuria who had remained on the land of their forefathers despite fleeing their village and who had taken refuge in neighboring Nazaret, are banned from visiting their destroyed houses or their land. Their properties were confiscated and they remain present as citizens of Israel and absent as rightful owners. Land appropriation by the Israeli state had not ceased. Even peasants who have escaped the absent present categorization suffer from the expropriation of their agricultural properties for the declared Israeli objective of judicing the land. The Nakba continues to this day even for those Israeli Palestinians who were denied their national identity label as Palestinians and are now referred to as Israeli Arabs. The truth behind the current situation is perhaps best illustrated by the destruction of Al-Araqi village in the Negev by Israel more than 100 times within six years each time after it was rebuilt by its stubborn original inhabitants with the help of Arab and Jewish activists. While the continuing Nakba is obscured from view in Israel by the laws and legislation approved by the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, the Nakba is very conspicuous in Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza. Those lands that are occupied in 67 are subject to military laws while settlements proliferate in every corner from Jerusalem which is being suffocated by Jewish settlements to the West Bank through the Jordan Valley. The consequences of the continuing Nakba are nowhere clearer than in Jerusalem and Hebrew where settlers plant their communities among Palestinian neighborhoods closing roads and turning ordinary cores into a daily nightmare. They reach the peak of inhumanity through transforming Gaza into the biggest open air prison in the world. In an effort to distinguish between a memory and the present, I have taken the liberty of elaborating the point in order to emphasize my hypothesis that the Nakba is not a past event that happened 70 years ago but is a continuing painful journey that only began in 48 and endures to this day. Memory of a past event however agonizing can be addressed through remembrance and requiring those guilty of instigating evil to face up to what they have committed in preparation for turning the memory of the event into a collective human memory. The present on the other hand needs to be addressed through serious efforts to change its inequities here and now. Political, intellectual, ideological tools are required as cohesive agents to bring together all those who stand against colonialist occupation regardless of their nationalities or their ethnic or religion or religious affiliations. Hence the error of asking the mutual recognition of the Holocaust and the Nakba becomes clear. I, speaking as a human being above all else, as a Lebanese by birth and a Palestinian by affiliation declare that I have no prerequisites for recognizing the horrors of the Holocaust and it's in fact my duty to keep its memory alive. The Holocaust is my responsibility as a member of the human race despite it having been a product of European fascism. As much my deeply ingrained moral duty is to be an active participant in the struggle against anti-Semitism as well as all forms of racism anywhere in the world. I am proud to walk the path charted by my mentors before me, members of the Lebanese and Arab Intellectual Activist Group, who formed the Anti-Fascism and Nazism League in Beirut in 1939 and were imprisoned for it by the fascist Vichy occupation regime at the time. This path leads me to continue the struggle against the Zionist Colonialist Occupation Project in Palestine. For me, the issue is one of principle and is non-negotiable. It also applies to the continuing Palestinian Nakba. Two wrongs do not make it right. The crime does not wipe out another and racism is not remedied by counter-racism. The continuing Nakba suffered by Palestinians should act as a wake-up call for the collective world conscience in an effort to defeat the last remaining Colonialist Occupation phenomenon in the world. The mutual recognition of the Holocaust and the Nakba is an affront to moral sensibilities. A solid moral stance is divorced from any form of negotiation, and the interplay of moralistic mirroring is irrelevant here. In this context, it's meaningless to speak of two sides being considerate of each other, nor is empathy a relevant concept. There merely exists a preparator and a victim, and there is no space for equating the two. The Nazi criminal in the Holocaust was the product of racism, an abhorrent ideology that should be continually repudiated and combated in whichever guise it presents itself. The continuing Nakba, on the other hand, is the product of the Colonialist Occupation, which internalizes racism and seeks to ethnically cleanse the land of its people by pursuing justification through several avenues. One of them, of course, is the myth of the idea of the promised land. In both cases, which are very distinct in nature, negotiation is inappropriate. Both racism must be totally eradicated, and the Colonialist occupation must be dismantled while preserving the rights of those who are recently part of the landscape because a crime is never erased by committing another. The Holocaust and the Nakba are not mirror images, but the Jew and the Palestinian are able to become mirror images of human suffering if they disabuse themselves from the delusion of exclusionist nationalist ideologies. The oppressed Jew in Nazi Europe is not only the mirror image of the Palestinian, but the rat of every human, everywhere, just as the Palestinian is the mirror image of all the expelled and oppressed peoples everywhere. In fact, he is the mirror image of the refugee tragedy playing out on the footsteps of the Third Decade and the painful cries for help emanating from Syrian, Iraqi, Libyan, Somali, and Afghani refugees as they wade through the sea of suffering and death once called the Mediterranean Sea. This is how the Sabunism and the Muslim manner become parallel mirrors, mirror reflecting the pain of a common human tragedy. In this vein, we begin to understand Edward Said's description of the Palestinian as the victim of the victim, and we find our way back to the optimism of the human will amidst the pessimism of the intellect. We rediscover the human values that under the very threat of obliteration by the counter forces of capitalism, barbarism, racism, tyranny, and extremism. And thank you.