YOGYAKARTA - UGM Faculty of Forestry made changes in order to improve organizational and management efficiency for the sake of improvement of the education system implementation. One of the implementations is by conducting the unification of four study programs, among others, Forest Management, Forest Conservation, Forest Products Technology, and Conservation of Forest Resources, to become one study program of Forestry.
"Starting from August 1, 2010 Faculty of Forestry no longer have four Study Programs, but only one Study Program," said the Dean of the Faculty of Forestry, Prof. Dr. Ir. Mohammad Na'iem, M.Agr.Sc., in the Dean's Annual Report 2010, which was read by the Vice Dean for Academic Affairs and Quality Control, Dr. Ir. Eny Faridah, M.Sc., on Saturday (18/12) at the Auditorium.
With the unification of study programs it is expected that the Faculty of Forestry will be more efficient and effective in organizing educational process at the undergraduate level. In addition, the Forestry graduates are expected to have broader competence as general foresters to be able to compete in the job market both nationally and globally.
Currently, the total number of students in the S-1, S-2, S-3, and D-3 programs are 1421 with the ratio of the number of graduate students reaching 18 percent. "In the future, the Faculty will continue to work to improve the ratio by 50 percent," he said.
He delivered that as many as 381 students of forestry or about 26.81 percent of all students have received scholarship assistance from 16 scholarship agencies, both from within and outside the country. In addition, the Faculty of Forestry also has succeeded in measuring the relevance of the curriculum with the demands of the workplace by conducting tracer studies and labor market signals. The results are as many as 66.4% of graduates had to wait for 0-6 months to obtain employment, 11.6% have a waiting period of 6 months-1 year, and the rest have the waiting period of more than 1 year. "About 75 percent of our alumni work in the forestry sector," he said.
On that occasion, the 47th Anniversary speech of the Faculty of Forestry is delivered by UGM Professor, Prof. Dr. Ir. Moch. Sambas Sabarnurdin, M.Sc., entitled Harmonization Efforts of Forest Sustainability and Prosperity. In his presentation, Sambas expressed the importance of university to develop qualified human resources that have holistic ability approach in managing land resources to balance the goals of development and environmental stability. “Human resources that can apply the integration of agricultural and forestry sciences in the field are greatly needed, therefore, an Agroforestry program is necessary,” he said.
In his view, Agroforestry Renewal in forestry needs to be done by referring to what has been learned from the people's daily practices. “We should not be ashamed to admit that the planting pattern used by forestry is essentially copied from the practice of farming communities,” he concluded.