Entering the 65th anniversary, Faculty of Agriculture attempts to keep moving forward. The Faculty is keen to improve itself and determined to realize its vision to become excellent higher education institution of agriculture and fisheries, both nationally and globally based on research that is oriented on the interests of the nation and the social welfare based on Pancasila.
"The age of 65 years for humans is a very mature age. However, for an institution of higher education, the age of 65 years is still at the exponential phase, meaning the potential to become much more advanced is still open widely," Dean of Faculty of Agriculture, Prof. Ir. Triwibowo Yuwono, Ph.D., said on Tuesday (27/9), reading the Report of the Dean at the auditorium of Faculty.
Triwibowo said the trend is currently more active in encouraging the Faculty to make improvements in agricultural higher education system. Although there is increasing number of new students in Faculty of Agriculture during the past recent years, it still needs preparation to face various challenges.
On the occasion, Triwibowo mentioned the increasing number of students enrolled in undergraduate program in Faculty of Agriculture UGM in past three years. New students in 2011 as many as 400 increases from the previous year as many as 314 people (2010), 337 people (2009), and 287 people (2008). "This is quite exciting because interest in agricultural science is relatively quite high," he said.
Meanwhile, the number of graduate students enrolled is relatively small compared to undergraduate program. In 2011, as many as 39 people are registered as students of S-2 program and 30 students in S-3. "The low interest on graduate program is due to the orientation of graduate education, Faculty of Agriculture UGM up to now tends to be conservative and technically oriented, while graduate education which provides orientation to the management system is poorly thought out. To anticipate the low number of new students in this graduate program, the possibility of re-orientation of graduate education, development of study interest which provides opportunities to develop a management approach in a particular scientific field needs to be thought," he said.
In the field of research, in 2011 Faculty of Agriculture UGM allocated research funds amounting to 270 million rupiah. The funds are planned to finance 27 research titles based on laboratory development. Until August 2011, it is recorded that 59 titles of research proposed by teaching staff of the Faculty have been approved for their funding. For total research funding as much as 8,649,770,000 rupiah increases from year 2010 as much as 4,373,477,000 rupiah.
Furthermore, for student-level research activities in 2011 there were 11 teams of students creativity program (PKM) who managed to get funding from Directorate of Higher Education amounting to 63.3 million rupiah. Triwibowo added that up to now Faculty of Agriculture has 125 active teaching staff, consisting of 120 civil servants, 2 CPNS, and 3 self-financing staff, while the educational staff includes 116 civil servants and 28 honorary staff.