Monday, March 4, 2013

How we protect name of MIT Part II

“It’s about time, it’s about change” This is the slogan Mr Obama used for his presidential election and became president of United States. He even won the Nobel peace prize recently. The word “change” is very popular now a day since Mr Obama started using it in almost every of his speech. That makes me to remember our old times when we were hungry of change in our MIT life. As I mentioned at my earlier posts, we have got privilege to study BE degree with the same syllabus and we had been recognized as MIT students by local residences. However we all know very well that the current system cannot guarantee us to become the Engineer that we really dreamed of. The educational facility we were going to get was simply not enough to train us as a successful Engineer. We realized that we are totally on our own. Instead of keep complaining the current system reactively, we understand that we should find the ways which we can practice within our limited capability. At that time, we were influenced by the books written by author Ko Tar and Mg Thit Min. Their articles about knowledge society, active learning, and third wave deeply captured our mind and made us imagining of our current MIT life to the one where we can fully utilize our skills and talents. But reality is far away from our dream. So shall we wait someone to change us or are we going to change ourselves? We started questioning ourselves that why can’t we change our community to knowledge society, why can’t we practice active learning rather than passive learning received from the deteriorated system, why can’t we move ourselves to the third wave although our country is still on first wave. In fact those were quite mouthful terms and seem to be impossible. However we consider that we all had been very lucky of being together in MIT and our friends will become our valuable resources for learning and sharing knowledge if they all agree that we can make it. We made brain storming sessions so many times and finally decided to print our ideas on T shirts. Here I would like to introduce one of our friends Pai Nay Man Maung who put a lot of efforts in making design of this T shirt to be able to present all our ideas and reflect the current system. He was born to be an artist rather than an Engineer. He has wonderful skills in creating any kinds of arts and he even composed a song for MIT that we sung at fresher welcome ceremony for our 9th batch brothers and sisters. At front for out T shirt, we put the graph indication about three ages which are agriculture, industrial and technology age. At the left side, we put our own created MIT logo with graduation grown. The word knowledge society is on top of the logo and below is fraternity, active learning and challenging sprits. We put those words deliberately together with MIT logo by giving the sense that we call came to MIT with common purpose where we can actually challenge any situations by practicing through active learning and we can actually transform our MIT to knowledge society. At the below of the graph, we gave a message that we can actually leap to the third wave through learning technology although we are at the agriculture age. At the back of our T shirt, we designed three waves in different color, the green represents agriculture, the gray is industrial and the black is technology and wisdoms. Two boys wearing MIT shirts are looking ahead the third waves by stepping on the books and our Engineering tools. The sentence below the picture gives message that we technology students are playing in key role to march to the third wave to be able to survive in the globalization age. We printed almost 200 over T shits for MDY students and 100 over T shirts for Sagaing and Kyauke Se students. We considered our movement as successful movements in terms of production as everyone was interested of wearing those T shirts proudly although we cannot justify how much we manage to change ourselves and our MIT community. However I still believe that this was good initiative to alert ourselves wake up from the misery of deteriorated system.

How we protect Name of MIT Part 1

After writing my first blog post, I couldn’t stop thinking about our past memories. I suddenly realized that I still have quite a lot of things to write. As all of you are aware, the words MIT, YIT had been disappeared since 1996 DEC student uprising. Start from our 8th Batch, we were called MTU that we simply couldn’t accept it because there are other students who used our MIT campus and called themselves as MTU students. (While all universities are closed, MOST selected the students who got total 150 marks in English and Mathematics subject at BEHS exam and enroll as BE students. Now they became the teachers in GTI,GTC and MTU). Obviously they are not one of us and we are not one of them. That was the main reason we did not allow to call us MTU students and kept using the word MIT. In fact that was a sort of discrimination and not a big issue but I guess all of you can understand the feeling of average 20 years old boys and girls at that time. It was not that we wanted to monopolize the BE degree and jealous of other BE students. We just wanted to be recognized who we really are. This past memories made me to write this post “how we defend and protect the name of MIT”. As I mentioned at my first blog post, after the announcement came out, we all seemed to become real MIT students. We were moved to a very old two storey building which is located at the corner of the Mandalay GTI campus and next to the public toilet. That building becomes our class rooms for 1st and 2nd year. For the whole 2 years in Mandalay GTI campus, we had to face the horrible smell from that toilet but eventually we were used to it. Although we were separated from GTI students, we are still sharing the same campus which was designated as Government Technical Institute. The other BE students had already occupied the MIT campus near Yan Kin Hill which was supposed to be ours. So it’s like we all were just shouting the words MIT but we didn’t own any single thing related about MIT. However, we always tried to adapt and did our best in every situations. One of our friends started to cut the sticker to the words MIT and paste to his motor bike. The other friend suggested making the printed sticker and pasting onto our motorbike front panel lamp. We ordered printed stickers and manage to convince almost all our friends to paste the sticker at our motor bike. We also ask our senior students and junior students to do so. If you were at Mandalay around year 2000,2001 and 2002, you will notice the motorbikes with the MIT stickers. If I am not wrong, there could be around 500 motorbikes in Mandalay with MIT stickers. Later Medical students and computer students also follow and paste their own university stickers on their motorbikes. The below picture is the sample of the sticker we used.

How we fought back our BE

The reason I am writing this blog post is in order to make a record of how we fought back our BE at 1999. I started this thread at our MIT forum from 2 years ago but not much response I received from there. I stopped writing that thread in half way but MIT ning network will be another chance for me to continue to write this post. Thanks to Ko Nyein Khant for encouraging me to write a blog post. The reason I am here today, we are here today is because of putting afford into cooperative and collaborative work to success of this activity. Salute to all 8th Batch MIT students from here who actively participated in this activity thanks to all 7th batch MIT students who kindly guided us in this activity. We passed our BEHS exam at 1996/1997 and we were qualified to study at MIT, YIT. Because of 1996 DEC Student uprising, all universities were closed from 1996 DEC to 1999DEC. So we had to start our first year at the end of 1999. At that time, our MIT ,YIT had been moved under Ministry of Science and technology, previously was under Ministry of Education. According to their new system, all MIT , YIT students were not allowed to start their first year and second year study at university and they had to attend at GTI according to their region. So for the first 2 weeks, we were put into the same class with GTI students but school authority promised that we will have to study directly to BE with their new systems. However we all were not very clear of their system and nobody can answer clearly our queries about path to BE degree. After 1 month, there was one announcement stated that we are not allowed to study BE degree directly and we have to study like GTI student. They put all of us to their current system GTI>GTC>BE. We all were get shocked and angry hearing that news. Then we started to organize the students who are interested to do the volunteer and discuss about this issue. Finally we agree to sign a petition and send our appeals letter to 5 peoples , GTI principal, Rector of MIT, Minister of Science and Technology, U Thaung and General Khin Nyunt who is the chairman of National Education Committee. There were a few considerations about our signing petition. 1. We don’t want anyone to be a leader that avoids the targeting of individual by MI agents. 2. There are risks to be investigated by MI agents whether our activity is related with any political movement. 3. How to organize the rests of the students and highlight the rights we are supposed to get. 4. How to make the immediate actions on the school principal and class teachers in order to show that we are not following their new systems. 5. Contingency plan what if our first appeal letter fails. We discuss again and again and finally we were able to conclude the actions and strategy we are going to move on. 1. As nobody must be designated as leader, we will have to do our signing petition as like each student write their own appeal letter to the authorities and send by them selves. We all agree that this strategy can get rid of the suspicion of the authority to be investigated who is leading and who is organizing. From the rest of the student’s view, a small group of peoples are just helping them to write an appeal letter and make a copy for them.. So we wrote an appeal letter and make 5 copies for each student. In our MDY, there were all about 300 first year students. We made 1500 copies of appeal letter and we even helped post office staff to put in to the letter box and make the registration of all letters. 2. We all understand that there was a risk of expelling from school, as a worse case scenario arrested by authority. We decided to write this appeal letter as a request letter that highlighting the rules and statement at University Entrance Guide Book. We didn’t state any words that we cannot accept their new system to us . The following are a few words in our letter. a. We all would like to study and attend the university peacefully at anywhere, anyplace (we purposely put this words because we know their idea of separating the students and we guess that we should focus only on one thing that what we really need) until we finish of studying the BE degree as stated in our University Entrance Guide Book while without involving in any political movement(their favorite words). As this letter is the very gently request letter to authority, that make impressions to all students that there is no harm to send this letter to authority. 3. We managed to gather all students in a hall and explain the plans and action we are going to do. We focused to explain the rest of the students about the disadvantages of 3 years closing schools and very unfair manner to all of us by putting together with 1999 BEHS GTI students.(no offence to any GTI students, just asking our rights). Of course there were a small group of people who couldn’t accept our movement and wanted to follow new systems by accusing us that we are afraid of disqualified for BE. Nevertheless, we managed to collect about 200 over petition letters. 4. For immediate action to school authority, we agreed that after we sent letters to 5 persons, we will not be attending class until we know the result of our appeal letter. We sent an official leave letter to GTI principal and stated clearly the reason of taking leave. 5. At that time, we don’t have proper contingency plan. But we manage to draft out our contingency plan if our first appeal letter fails. a. Send second letter to 5 persons again. b. Send third letter to 5 persons and one special appeal letter to Head of SPDC. I heard this kind of movement was not only at MDY, Sagaing and YGN students also sent their appeal letters to authorities. After two weeks, Ministry of Science and Technology announced that we are allowed to study to BE directly but we will have to study our first and second year in GTI according to our region. But we will be taught with the same module and same syllabus that were assigned for MIT and RIT. At that announcement date, you all can guess what we did..:D Of course we all were drunk under U Pain Bridge wearing while color shirts. Those were all beautiful moments of my very beginning MIT student life. That’s not the end of the story, I still have a few blog post to write. “How we met U Thaung”, “How we humiliate a teacher who encourage us to join to USDA”, and “How we react to U Kyaw San (Ex-MIT rector) who force us to use MTU instead of MIT”. I will be glad to write if you all are interested to hear about all our exciting moments.