Dr Sahar Al-Sudani

I graduated in Computer Science in 1992 as a Computer Programmer and worked in the industry for 2 years, but I found it boring because there wasn’t much interaction with people. When you work in programming you mainly work on your own, not with the team, so I decided to do a Masters for a change. When I finished my Master degree they asked me to teach, but when I started it wasn’t easy as I was very young, about 26. I started teaching like 60 or 70 students which was challenging because I was young and close to their age, but I realised I liked it so decided to continue my PhD to become a lecturer.

Well I think it is really important. If you want to build a society you need a very solid education system, so education itself as a profession is really important in any society. I don’t feel I can cope with teaching kids, but feel I do well with teaching adults.

To be honest it’s the student body, because in each university you will see differences in the student bodies. I’d say the University of Kent is an inclusive environment for all students, and I also taught in the University of Greenwich which has a similar student body. We have some high performing students on the Medway campus because it is a widening participation campus, whereas at Canterbury the level of students entry qualification is a bit different, a little higher.

Well definitely my family, they were very supportive of me. I spent all my time studying so they would always be supporting me, through my Bachelor of Science, through Masters and my PhD and I am very grateful for their support.

The University of Kent to be honest is a place which very much meets my expectations. There is a system at the university, it feels like the right place to work. There are standards, there are regulations, I would say the team I work with, the people I work with, the students, they are all fantastic and all meet my expectations.

Well when they progress and they achieve higher marks, it makes me so happy. Most of my students try to please me so they study hard so that’s the main thing. When I see them graduate and then move on to Masters and PhD, there’s a lot of self-satisfaction which makes me so happy.

The research is mainly related to teaching so it further improves my own teaching. I can’t compare myself now with 11 years ago, it’s completely different and now my skills are further developed so that research has a huge impact on my teaching now.

There was an event I attended last year called Away Day. It was a 2 day event to look at what we are doing with our students, what support we provide for them, how to make sure all students are treated fairly and work together and have a good relationship with other students. It was an extremely good experience and so pleasing, I’ve attended other events at the university but nothing like this as it had such a positive impact on people and making them work harder and better.

I think the biggest thing I’ve been doing is working on the attainment gap. We want to make sure all of our students perform well and can achieve a good degree, but we see some students passing and not getting a great degree, so Student Success aims to reduce the attainment gap across various courses. What I’ve achieved this year with the help of the Student Success team is to reduce the attainment gap so that more of our students achieve a good degree.

I will never stop teaching because this is my career. I am planning to do more about my research, because I’m only focused on my teaching research, and since I have a PhD in Computer Science I want to make a mix with my experience as a Computer Scientist and Higher Education. An example would be making a model using neural network, which is a technique used to predict things, so I use this model to predict if the student will do well or not. I would like to continue doing research on this area where I combine my Computer Science with my Higher Education skills.

I hope this organisation will give some clearer idea to people on how the university will progress, because at one point the ranking for the university was 'twenty something' but for some reason this year it goes down, so I hope that improves again and people see this as a high ranking university.

The first thing would be my students' success and then colleague support - I have an excellent team here in Medway. When I get a high success rate and my students average mark goes up, that motivates me and makes me want to do more and try harder.

I think the best thing is you choose an area you like. When I was a first year Computer Science student the lecturer told us at the beginning "if you don’t enjoy writing a program, it’s better to change your module or course". You may not like it now however you might in the second year, but all students should know if they like it or not.