FRCN-UK Day Conference - 15 September 2007

Program

Poster

Saturday 15 September 2007, Venue: COCM Mission Centre, Milton Keynes

Lunch provided, Registration: £ 5

Language: Mandarin and/or English

09:00 am

Arrival and registration

10:00 - 10:30

Worship & Welcome

10:30 - 12:15

Parallel Workshops

(1) Serving God with your career

Speaker: Paul Chung, Professor of Computer Science and Head of Department, Loughborough University

Title: Academic Career - Motivation, Satisfaction and Ambition

The focus of this session is on “Why?” and “What?” rather than “How?” It seems that the aim of many scholars in academia is to gain the title “Professor”. In this session we will take a step back together to examine and reflect why we want to pursue an academic career in the first place and what is it that we really want to achieve. Is becoming a professor really our ultimate aim? More fundamental than this is what will bring satisfaction in our job? What are some of the problems that academic faces in their job that robs away their happiness? We will explore these questions together.

(2) Serving God in your Church

Speaker: Dr Helen Cheng, Lecturer in soil mechanics, UCL

Title: Serving God in your church - difficulties and blessings

This session will explore the difficulties and blessings of serving God in your church. We can share about our experiences and opinions on how to serve in your church, explore whether or how the university working environment will affect the serving, and find out the relevant teachings in the bible.

Helen can share about her experience of serving in the church while she was in Hong Kong and in the UK. You are also encouraged to share about your experience related to this topic during the workshop.

12:30 pm

Lunch

1:30 - 3:15

Parallel Workshops (con't)

(1) Serving God with your career

Speaker: Professor Jie Zhang, Chair of Wireless Communications and Networks, Head of CWIND (Centre for Wireless Network Design)

Title: Career Development workshop.

In my part, I will talk about the strategies to be a good academic, these include funding applications (e.g., some funding schemes for new academics), publications, networking, and research topics. I will also talk about the mistakes I made and lessons learned during my career development.

(2) Serving God in your Church

Speaker: Dr Patrick Luk, Head of Power and Drive Systems Group, Cranfield University

Title:

"Academics are a 'minority' group within the Chinese Churches in the UK. We think, argue, manage, and probably behave in rather different ways from many of our fellow members in the church. We may be seen as detached, arrogant, and hard to please. I would outline, from experience, some of the challenges we may face while serving actively in our church. We will then take a look around to learn from other's views and experience, and hope to find some ways to make us a more ‘likeable' and 'approachable’ group, so that we can be more effective in our church service.

The latter part of the workshop concerns some personal experience of my Children Sunday School ministry in the past years. Here, I would like to challenge the participants, as academic, that this is one of the most worthwhile things we could ever do for a church, in particular a Chinese one!"

3:15 pm

Tea Break

3:30 - 4:00

Conclusion reports for both workshops

4:00 - 5:00

Fellowship, sharing and Prayers

5:00 pm

You are welcome to stay behind afterwards for a cup of tea and browse in the COCM Book room

please send your full name, email, telephone to Mrs Meggy Wei at the COCM office cocm@cocm.org.uk (Please contact the COCM office also if you need help with overnight accommodation.)