- Why do students come to university? What are they looking for in a university? Knowing this would help us understand better students' motivations and plans for higher education so that we could incorporate necessary elements into our teaching to meet students' expectations. Let's hear directly from students about this. - Prestigious. - Well known. - Well recognised. - Reputation. - The rankings and reputation of universities. - Generally, overall ranking, but I know it's very biased towards research, so if I would look back again, I would look more if there are rankings for teaching and maybe for student satisfaction rather than research. - Its contributions to the academic society. - Apart from reputation, how many papers and what kind of papers has it published, and has it contributed enough to the engineering community? - It also has the function of doing research and acknowledges the benefit to society. - The universities that can prepare me for a better education and better prospects in the job market. - What is the actual employment rate after graduation? - Diverse. - Diversity. - Very diverse, allows great diversity and a lot of freedom. Try to manage their life in their way and have a lot of associations that students can join and participate to know more friends. - Is mentally stimulating. I want a university that inspires me to think outside the box. - The internship opportunity. - I think I was very attracted by it being very international and there was a lot of possibilities for going abroad, a lot of partner universities. - Before, I studied in my home university. I studied one year in Paris in a very French environment and I feel that it's very nice to interact with different nationalities because you get a new insight and a new way of learning as well with different ways of thinking as well. - A lot of facilities, because I'm doing engineering, so that requires a lot of tools and technologies. - Should be resourceful and helpful, so by means of resourceful, I could have access to the library and borrow as many books as I can. - I'm not exactly sure, actually. I hope to do a Master's degree, but then I have really no idea in what area. - I want to have an employment year and at least try and get an internship this summer, but I'm not sure what industry I want to go into (mumbling). - To be a researcher. - Maybe study a master, because I don't think that I could find a job that easy because I study arts, so that would be my plan. - My plan is to work in Hong Kong for the first two, three years at least, and then I'll probably go for a Master's, but I have to do some job so that I can get some experience before going towards my masters education. - I hope to apply for a job and possibly I want to do an internship first to gain some work experience in my field of study, and then I'm going to apply for a job after graduation. - Knowledge. - Professional knowledge. - A university gives me a lot of knowledge that I could apply later to my career, to my work in the future. - I wanted to learn the new technology that is being used worldwide right now. I wanted to actually learn about the new technology which is being innovated every day. - Technical skills. - Practical skills and to deal with real world problems. - Life skills, I guess. Learn how to organise myself and manage my time. - Human things like being confident and applying everyday life. - Collaborative skills. To learn how to be with people, to learn how to be a good person, to be a whole person instead of just learn some solid knowledge. - To understand others and to have you solve the interpersonal problems. - I also want to learn about the skills that are for academic uses and also for our future career that we need to take care of. I hope that university can help for career planning so that you will not feel very helpless and hopeless once you graduate from university and you suddenly realise that you don't know how to find a job or how to take care of your living. - I hope to learn the kind of skills which I'll need in that specific workforce. - Build up the skills I need to get to the job I want. A range of skills. I know as well, a lot of other big four companies don't really care what degree you have, as long as you've got a degree behind you, you can adapt to people, you can do work with teams. I want to build up teamwork. Quite good at collaborating with people. Stuff like that, it's just being able to adapt. - The thing I was looking to learn most were language skills, analytical skills, being able to do research correctly. - You equip me to be a better researcher. - We hear many words mentioned repeatedly by students just now. Ranking, contribution to the society, employability, university climate, learning opportunity, skills and resources. They actually dovetail the typical predictors of student satisfaction with university education. To name a few major ones, skill development, intellectual climate and infrastructure. Students obviously like to learn in an environment that is diverse and international. Is there room to mix this expectation in teaching? Absolutely, yes. For example, it could be an assignment requirement that students need to collect and discuss different perspectives about a topic, or diversity could be one of the criteria for grouping students in a learning activity. I believe you can be far more creative than me. While employability is one thing students value, not every student has a concrete career plan yet, but they do have a lot in common in terms of what they want to get out of university education, such as professional knowledge and generic skills like problem solving skills and collaborative skills. In fact, many of these student expectations, again, dovetail(mumbling) nicely with the educational aims or graduate attributes in many universities. So, based on what students said, which was also consistent to the research evidence, I believe there are a few areas we can work on in our instructional design. Professional and academic knowledge, skill development, employability and intellectual climate.