Great, thank you so much Saskia for the introduction and it's a pleasure to connect with you. Good day, good morning and good evening to all of those online. My name is Dr Nyambura Mwagiru. I am the current head of Tigerberg International from the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at Stellenbosch University.
We are located in South Africa in the Africa region. Thank you to the program organizers from Global Admissions for the invitation today to present. and I'm presenting to you from the Faculty of Medicine and Health Science and the presentation has got more than we need to give you an introduction to the region, our university and specifically the faculty and the programs that we offer. So on the screen you'll see an image of the faculty where we're located in the Western Cape and our mission is to advance health equity in South Africa and beyond. Geographically we're located in the southern tip of Africa in the Western Cape, our catchment area for students coming to the to study with us is from the Western Cape Province, the larger South Africa region, the Southern African Development Community, which is our regional grouping, Africa as our region of focus, and the regions beyond our continent.
A lot of the calling cards is our viticulture, our beautiful heritage, our architecture, and the wonderful environment and heritage that we have in South Africa. As you can see, Stellenbosch is over 100 years old. We celebrated the centenary in 2018 and we have over 30,000 students situated on multiple campuses.
We have about 10 campuses and over 3,000 academic faculty and it is a truly African university to which many students have come and we have now generational impact as a result of that. We have five campuses. Tigerberg is located on the Tigerberg campus, the bottom left of your screen. At the top left, we have the business school, Stellenbosch Business School campus, located in Belleville. At the top right, we have our rural campus, Worcester Medical Campus, which is located in a different province.
We have Saldana Military Campus, located in Saldana, and our what we call Central Campus, which is located in the Stellenbosch municipality. And so all of these campuses are residential and students would engage in those environments for their academic training. Just to give you more of the beauty of our environment, so we are located in the wine lands essentially and students have an opportunity to visit the Cape and to explore and to experience the different culture and societal structures we have in South Africa and the Western Cape and students can come and train with us in all of the different disciplines offered within our 10 faculties.
Our focus of course is to receive students interested to apply for medical and health sciences. We are driven by an internationalization strategy and at the top you'll see there Professor Hester Klopper, Deputy Vice Chancellor for Internationalization Strategy, Global and Corporate Affairs and our SUI Stellenbosch University International Director Mr Robert Kotze and on the right of the screen is the Dean's Management Team driving the SU and the FMHS strategy and the internationalization strategy as well just for your information. So we are a globally networked university, we have institutional partners all over the world.
And this is just an indication of where our partners come from. Our focus is Africa, but we receive students from over 320 institutions located in 64 countries. And it's a wonderful, diverse community.
A bit about our approach to internationalisation. So we are applying a strategic focus for internationalisation at the university, driven by comprehensive internationalisation, which makes our approaches, our models, our frameworks intentional. And therefore, we are very clear about our areas of focus and the gaps that are identified to ensure that we have a full view of the need and what we can support at the university. Essentially, it's inviting intercultural integration, diverse views and an excellent skill set that students can learn, staff can engage. And we do this by creating institutional opportunities for cooperation and collaboration.
Some of the strategies that inform us is creating a university that is highly networked and collaborative. We strengthen our research focus and on the screen there is one of the global conferences that we held last year, Global Health Conference, inviting staff and students from over 100 staff and students from 50 countries last year alone. So we hope to be an employer of choice, a thriving university that students can enjoy when they come to us.
As always, we do this in a very deliberate fashion so that when you do engage with us as a student, as a staff or visiting researcher, you will have these dimensions that we as an institution are striving to put in place and to ensure that you have a thorough and memorable international experience. So critical to us, therefore, is the engagement, student engagement, academic research and reputation dimensions, and with a governance aspect that informs how we structure our offerings. We are growing in innovation and we are striving to grow the postdoctoral and research fellows opportunities as well.
Critical for the university is a set of values that underpins and is under the undercurrent of our efforts and the idea is that we are ensuring a very tight cycle from our teaching, our learning and research and very importantly social impact and I'll touch on that again as we go forward. So we have to look at the university values and make sure that as a faculty we are addressing these very important aspects of excellence, compassion, equity, respect and accountability. That was a bit about the university, now to the faculty of medicine and health sciences. And so we are one of the largest faculties after faculty of economic and management sciences.
We have our own campus, sometimes the word satellite campus applies, but we have students who are resident on campus, very central in the Tygerberg area. On the screen you'll see our Tygerberg teaching hospital, so that's the tertiary hospital in the Western Cape, and the little buildings next door, which is quite large, is our education and clinical staff buildings. For our faculty, established in 1956, we have a mission and a vision, and we essentially aim to help to advance health and equity. We do this through transformative learning, health and development, and cultivating active global citizenship.
With thoughts about us, which I've shared already, Okwanda Rural School, which is quite an interesting... training that students do like to come to us for. We offer specialist training, very excellent and wide broad research agenda. We aim to cultivate and build competent caring and ethical professionals in the health arena and we are maintaining a student-centered teaching and learning focus as well as practice. We're one of the most diverse environments on campus and our extensive international collaborations at a national level.
and local partnerships also enable our students to gain the experience they need. As the faculty, we have our own strategic focus areas and our own values and if we have an acronym, I-CARE. So inclusivity, compassion, accountability, excellence, respect and equity, double E. And we have the strategic focuses on the right, the six, and this really helps us to maintain as a faculty our drive to include students from the Africa region and also the importance of fostering inclusive partnerships and networks as well.
So I'll just continue to show the excellent facilities that we offer. But essentially, our focus is becoming one of the leading African and health intensive and research leading universities in the Africa region, remaining inclusive, but focusing on problems pertinent to the continent and building on shared experience with our international collaborators as well. But we also like to do students to invite them to come and. train, as you know, very specialist training.
So our student profile is also 70% female, 30% male. We have over 4,000 students on campus and residing in their home countries as non-residential students. We have 2,500 undergrad students, about 1,900 postgraduates, and about 477 first-year students coming in on an annual basis. Our academic program runs from January at the start of each year and ends in December.
and we have two semesters and two terms within each semester. We graduate about 50 PhD students per annum and we have a great diverse undergraduate body with about 60 percent undergraduates and 61, so it's a really nice intellectual environment as well. We have about 14 departments within each of the departments.
We have divisions, so the students apply for their areas of interest and we receive applications for training at undergraduate and postgraduate level. The divisions are more specifically located on our website and I'll share more details with you about that. We also have 20 research departments and so those interested in engaging with research practice which is non-clinical can also approach our centres located here and also listed on our website for more details about their focus. We have a widespread of disciplines because we have local and also global health challenges that we are addressing.
We have HIV and TB, non-communicable and communicable diseases such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancer. And so it's very important to maintain our international, but as well as local expertise to address these challenges interspersed, of course, with social and economic dimensions. As I shared, as a leading research intensive university, we're ranked second in South Africa and between 251 and 300 in the world. And we're doing very well on that front. Within our discipline, clinical, preclinical and health sciences, we are ranked 126 to 150. So we're doing very well in that regard.
Just to share a little bit with you about why we seek out the brightest minds, and we are also developing excellent facilities to enable this kind of cutting edge research. and because we believe it makes a difference to people, those we represent and those we serve. And just reminding you again that underpinning our areas of training, learning and teaching is the impact that it will have in the local and broader world. Just to give you a bit more detail about the main research themes and competencies for those interested, we have multiple chairs, South African research chairs that are located at our faculty and as you can see there for example, for example, the chairs in childhood tuberculosis, animal tuberculosis, TB bioinformatics. And it just means that we have additional resources to create postdoctoral posts, additional supernumerary registrar training opportunities where possible, and to fund key research and student and staff exchanges for periods of time.
And the research that we do leads into publications and, as you can see, generates impact not only through reputation. but also through the research that is then awarded at very key international forums. And so we try to celebrate really the milestones achieved by our faculty as well.
And these are also faculty working with PhD students, masters, and the focus is to build on undergraduate research. Just to give you an idea, we're actually launching the Biomedical Research Institute this week. So this has been a major project for the faculty. And as you can see, they're growing our facilities.
increasing exposure to the rural campus and increasing our opportunities for students and staff to really advance and take their research further. And to that end the faculty continually assesses upgrades academic facilities as we continue to do. So if you come to us and you see building it is a good thing and we have multiple plans now we're actually building a facility to make sure that we have no interruptions from the electricity outages in South Africa.
We just upgraded the Hamilton BIOS, which can store over 5 million samples from all over the country and the world. We upgraded our state-of-the-art clinical and social simulation skills lab for those coming. It has cameras and we can do virtual training.
And again, underscoring the importance of societal impact, which results in our publications and our annual FMHS publication, but also research for the university. And then linking it to the community and showing that the work we do has a direct impact. to the communities in the Western Cape, South Africa and beyond. Not to overstep the mark, but really we are a highly achieving environment.
Students who come also experience and benefit from this as well. Quickly now, that was a bit about the faculty. I will hope that our organizers will keep me on time. In the meantime, now to Tigerberg International.
We are the space within the faculty that enables international students, trainees, visitors to arrive safely on our shores. We have a team of about nine staff. We facilitate international undergraduate electives, postgraduate elective training, short term, postgraduate full degrees.
And we also are fostering great opportunities for outward mobility for our students to train clinically or non-clinically at universities abroad. We engage in global engagement analysis as well as fostering our institutional new and potential partners. Just a bit about our services. So we are in advisory space.
We liaise with our faculty and the institution. institutions that enable students to train. So applications, confirmation of acceptance and clinical placements at our sites of training. We have multiple clinical sites, Tygerberg hospital, Mitchells Plain, Kaya Leach hospital and other clinics depending on your study.
We provide support with medical health, medical board registration. The Health Professions Council of South Africa registers all clinical practitioners. They are located in Pretoria. We also support with visa letters for application and advice on accommodation and other aspects of the experience.
And then we also build programs, so summer and winter school, and ensure that we, our students, are in keeping with the law and the legislature of South Africa. Quickly about international education, we are an international education space and we are also building towards creating this for our academic environment. So Equitable access is important to us and developing a broader approach, but also encouraging students to consider Africa as a destination of choice and Stellenbosch as their training institution for electives for non-clinical opportunities and also recruiting professional staff. Towards this end, we have to design international offices to do this, and our vision is to create and enable transformative, inclusive, effective healthcare, education, research, and social impact opportunities, local and globally, through collaboration. So we hope we do that with our values, which are to be excellent in our service, to maintain our integrity and flexibility, and always being resourceful.
So we were impacted by the COVID pandemic. And we tried very hard to ensure that despite the local closures of borders and the undergraduate elective program being postponed for a while, we are now resuming those opportunities. Students can choose elective opportunities in the six undergraduate programs, medical, MBCHB, BSc Physiotherapy, dietetics, speech, language therapy, nursing, midwifery and occupational therapy.
And you can see there our students are multi-talented. We offer a variety of postgraduate programmes, which is why I've not listed them here, but our doctors are already trained, come and apply for supernumerary training and specialty and sub-specialty training in their disciplines of choice, coming from residency programmes abroad, spending anywhere from four weeks to a year at the postgraduate level. Once again, our support services, application services, student support, program development and institutional partnership and global engagement. Just to give you an idea of who comes, our students come from all over the world.
They come from the European region, North America, Africa. Of course, we have also students coming from New Zealand and Australasia and now increasingly from the Asian countries, of course, and the Middle East, which is wonderful. We train in English. Those who have English as a second language provide their English competency. I honour the students with these photos who chose to stay with us during COVID.
despite the challenges. I'm aware of time Saskia, so please just let me know if there's anything else. Yes, so can you possibly just quickly go over the admissions process for students?
Yes, I can. Okay, thank you for that. That's the next slide.
So this is just a quick, it's a six-step process but it does take time. So students applying at an undergraduate level, I chose this one, and the postgraduate is a bit more specific, you can address that, you can inquire. A student writes and inquires if they can apply. They start this process nine months, nine to 12 months before arrival. And they will apply.
We are open now for the 2024 year. You apply for one of the electives you'd like to train in for four weeks or eight weeks at a maximum. We send you an application form and you do this through our Sun student application system and you'll receive a student number. We then request clinical placement for you and confirm once the department has approved your placement and your time.
of training. We then provide the forms for HPCSA registration and send you a letter of acceptance and in that time you can hopefully be preparing for your travel accommodation and we send you the fees which are customized per student depending on what you're training for. At a postgraduate level it's just a little bit different.
We do your qualifications accreditation through EPIC, ECFMG located in the US. We request a foreign workforce endorsement letter. and then we apply for HBCSA.
For postgraduate electives, it's about six to seven months, depending on your date of arrival. And for postgraduate full degree students then also apply for four to five years. And we advise you on how to do that depending on your program. I think that's it for now, Saskia. And if I go on, then they can ask any other questions in the meantime.
Okay, so I think the biggest question will probably be quite helpful to... a lot of students, since a lot of students are looking for undergraduate programs, if they're interested in doing medicine, can you maybe explain the difference between the MBBS program and studying at Stellenbosch University, which program they can undertake over there? So our electives are offered to students in their fourth, fifth and sixth year, so final year of training. and our departments really receive those and assess the eligibility of the student to complete and be competent in the clinical training required.
Of course if you're in a first, second or third year you can apply for an observership but you may not be permitted to do clinical training. We do look at curriculums depending on the country or region you are applying from. Some students enter the clinical platform earlier.
Our South African residents and students are trained very early on the clinical platforms. and hence our focus on fourth, fifth and sixth year for training. We are working on building opportunities for our first, second and third years on the research side and also summer schools and winter schools to expose them to our faculty, our facilities and give them an idea of what they can apply for in their third or fourth, fifth and sixth years.
Okay, thank you so much, Dr. Moghera, for introducing these programs, for introducing Tigerberg International and Stellenbosch University.