My official work website

Finally, I successfully configured my own website for official use.  This website will discuss my official work as an academician. I hope the website can also help fresh graduate to plan their future. Therefore, I will also discuss about property investment and entrepreneurship which will focus on young graduates or those who are still fresh in the industry (less than 5 years of working). But, first of all, they must choose the most suitable carriers for themselves so that they can grow their skills, knowledge and valuable experience.

The website also will discuss about unseen opportunities available in the university which widely tab by MNC or Multi National Companies. The opportunities may come in many form such as R&D collaboration, seed funding, training, skilled or professional workers, exploration and many more. I am able to make the linkages due to my extensive experience doing work for industry.

You can also learn something from the entries especially on current and future technology development whether you realize it or not. For those who want to further study in whatever field you choose, you may also benefit from it. Parents who are helping their children to choose field of study, you may ask related questions in the website. What are your concern? Go visit:

http://zulfakar.fke.utm.my

Knowledge In PhD more valuable than Property Investment

It is common to find people who inherit property from their parents sold the property for the money. Without sufficient knowledge, people will always choose the money first rather than exploring how to generate income from the property. You may have RM200,000 by selling the property. But, RM200,000 may not last for even a year.

I already have two houses when I finally decided to further study for a PhD in Electrical Engineering. My specialization areas are electronics or to be more specific are Programmable Logic Controller (PLC), Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), Compiler, and embedded system design.

Whenever you pursue for a knowledge, God will always reward you in many ways. Within a year of doing my PhD, I found a way to buy a shop office with only RM1,000 down payment.


I submitted my thesis on the 30th August 2016.

Towards the end of my thesis submission, I managed to buy a two storey house and another shop office. Beside polishing my skills and knowledge to PhD level, I managed to accumulate a lot of knowledge in property investment. Although I am just a lecturer without any rank, my property investment is quite a big accomplishment.

Submitting a PhD thesis is a very hard work. Many of my friends gave up without finishing their thesis even some of them already published some of their works. Preparing for the Viva is a lot harder than I anticipated. I still need to do a lot of works, search for the latest research publication, preparing the slides, practice and practice. However, the slide presentation preparation is less stressful than completing the thesis.

My Viva-voce presentation was done in the 2nd May 2017. It was started at about 9.10 am and lasted until about 1.15 pm.

Now, I am more comfortable when people call me Dr. Zulfakar!

Here is one of video clips that motivate me to complete my PhD:

Sometimes, I wonder how can I bought all those properties. Part of the answer is here.

Learning is a never ending process. Knowledge is also Wealth!

Winner of Capstone Projects 2016

     Starting last year, my department has a new lab design for final year students. The project is based on groups. Each year the themes are different. This year the theme are about Electronic Device for Campus Security Enhancement, Digital Agriculture, Digital Home, Digital Healthcare and Public Safety. Beside the themes, students are encouraged to focus on developing their own sensors, or Internet of Things (IoT) applications.

     There were 20 groups competing in those categories. My students' group is in Digital Home. They built a system known as Automatic Planting System (APS). Although the system was developed for an agriculture system, it was not meant for a mass production system. It is customized for home used. The main idea is to optimized space utilization especially if one has a small space home.In addition, the system was supposed to automatically watering the plants based on the configured schedule. Thus, home users can let the plant been taken care even though they are busy working or traveling.

In the same category, the competitors are:

Well, actually two of the above projects are from Digital Agriculture groups. I just put them together to see how huge differences between my students' project and them.

The Digital Home winner project is as below:

 

Winners from other categories:

The overall winner is my student's group!

Overall, students able to achieve the product development specification. However, some of the products' features are not really convenient, practical, solving user's problem and not innovative enough. They can improve the products further if they can get sufficient feedback on time. But, based on the jurors feedback they can improve the products further on their own or if there is any interested party to do so.

The most important thing is students learn multi-discipline knowledge and skills to complete the project. Congratulation!

Property Investment is like studying for a PhD

Today, I have achieved a major milestone in my life. After years of studying, faced many hardships and sometimes almost gave up to continue, I finally submitted my PhD thesis on the last day of submission dateline.It was a series of hardworks and still continuing do so. The journey to PhD is still in progress until after the Viva correction. The hardest part in doing PhD is to come up with ideas how to contribute, and how to proceed with related activities. But, the most critical part is do you dare to begin your journey in pursuing PhD.

For people who have not invest in property but thinking to do so, they will face with the same questions. Some people already bought their home. Since their purpose to buy is for personal use, it does not come along with the questions above. When you buy a house for a personal use, most of the questions in your head is does the new house suitable for your lifestyle. For an investor, the house should be bought and hold for a specific time period. Upon achieving the investment goal parameters, the house should be let go. It is the same when I study for my PhD. There is always a time limit in achieving your goals. But it does not mean everybody can or must achieve their goals at the same time period.

Some people decided to pursuing their PhD without thinking it through. Due to their job functions, or jobless or whatever reason, they started to study PhD. This is like buying a property without thinking thoroughly what to do with the property, how to maintain the property and how to prosper with the property. Surprisingly there are still many people who furthering study or buying property with the same mindset. Many of them will be trapped in a situation where they have difficulty to end the situation. This is especially true if they only think to be a property investor after bought and live in the house.In summary, they fail to have multiple plans.

For inexperience people, the most difficult part is to find the best ideas which suite best for them. Simply following other people's ideas or strategy is like repeating previous research works without finding the improvement or contribution which deserve a reward for yourself. Ideas and strategies must be modified whether minor or major to make them suitable for your specific situation. To make it worst, you have to pay a huge price for this common mistake where in both fields you will lose a lot of time. And time is really gold in both of them.

One of the simple way to compensate for your inexperience is to mix with people with similar dreams, wavelength or situation. The more people you can get together, the more probability for success. But as in any field, it is also important to filter out ideas which are not yet ready for you. Ideas can come in many places at weirdest time or while exchanging information with people with similar goals.

There are still many similarity between pursuing PhD and property investment. Since both of them have many similarities, is it possible to achieve both of them at the same time. For me, my property investment really take off after I started continue my study in PhD. Towards the middle of PhD and despite the hardship, I managed to grow my property investment. Hopefully, I can successfully defend my PhD thesis which means I can also reap the benefit from my property investment!

It is always rewarding to do both of them. Why not you?