Fisheries Studies in Indonesia and My Lectures

The aim of my Indonesia visit was building bridge between two countries and continents, knowledge transfer by giving lectures to Indonesian fisheries students and academics . Let them know what is going on on the other side of earth, what is the focus of our researches, how fisheries especially aquaculture studies have been carried out in Europe and Turkey. 

The faculty I visited is belong to Airlangga University (UnAir). This university is one of the 4000 universities and one of the biggest university in Indonesia. They also have a campus 600 km away from main campus in Banyuwangi city (to read more about my this trip please click here).

My first week i had attended a conference and a workshop as an invited speaker and also have done 2 different anesthesia experiments with Dr. Laksmi and her students (I will write about that later). 

In my second week of visit, I had chance to give one hour lecture to last year students in Faculty of Fisheries and Marine and the subject was Aquaculture in Turkey and Europe and my Aquaponics greenhouse. They listened me very carefully and asked several questions on exchange programs... 

And last week of my visit finally I had another chance to meet students in Surabaya. Faculty prepared a schedule for me and it includes 8 hours courses for 3 semester students mostly about fisheries biology lesson. As I have told you before the faculty is very big. One thousand students, six hundred of them study Aquaculture. Each year has nearly 150 students and four years study... So, they have divided sub-classes. Third semester has 4 sub-classes and  I have to give same 2 hours lectures to each of them.

So, I planned my talks as three part. First part I have given a lecture about embryology. The development stages of fertilized fish eggs. Explained them model organism and why we should know the embryonic stages of egg... In the second part of my lecture I have given them a morphological discrimination of fin fish from different populations. How the environment effect the phenotype of fish how we can measure and find out this discrimination and what these results give us on fisheries biology perspective. The last part of my lecture was about Aquaculture in Turkey and Europe and Student Exchange Programs. I have explained them how big the aquaculture production in Indonesia by giving some numbers and compared with EU and Turkish aquaculture. They were surprised. Of course they are much more interested in the exchange possibilities how to study in Turkey or in Europe...

Interestingly, their English language level was very high. That surprised me a lot. All students have a good English level. Later I have learnt that is one of the criteria the faculty are looking for starting to study in this program. That's why I received very interesting questions, about model organism, how they have been using, ethical issues on animal welfare, environmental effects of fisheries, over-fishing effects on fish populations, pollution etc. I did not expect that much successful students to be honest with you. I am surprised as well..

I could feel they liked my lectures, the ambiance in the classroom their looking and concentrations, listening breathless, respects and of course helps... The live this moment was fantastic experience in my academic life but was not enough, I should have taken a selfie of this moment too...

Now, I am going to prepare a small questionnaire to get feedback from them. I really wonder how they liked or dislike my lectures... Will share the results here of course ;)