A frustrating experience with MARA - yet Ezreen Farina proceeded to do her Masters in Electrical Engineering.

Despite of getting 2nd class Upper Honours degree ( Electrical ) , a 7 band in IELTS , 3 simultaneous Deans award and an unconditional offer of a place at Sheffield University to do her Masters degree in Electrical Engineering , our daughter Farin was unable to do so because of MARA's reluctance to sponsor her. True to many's belief that now a days MARA is a very unreliable agency . It was just merely rhetoric talk by the BN govt. to help the Bumiputeras . In actual fact it was just ready to give it's helping hands only to to the UMNO cronies . Since I do not belong to that category, they gave all sorts of excuses . Infact I even wrote to Dato Shafiee Afdal ,the Minister in charge of MARA . The agency played ' wayang kulit 'with me . The Minister gave a 'sokong' letter but the MARA Director replied that it was under consideration . Till the end ( 10th Sept. was the date when my daughter was suppose to report to Sheffield ) there was no positive reply and I told my daughter Farin to forget about it . She did not apply the JPA scholarship because JPA put a condition that it would only sponsor JPA scholars while my daughter was a MARA a scholar .Luckily she was offered a place to the Master's degree programme at University Teknologi Malaysia , Skudai ( her alma mater ) which she began attending on 1st July 2009 .

In the mean time she applied for a fellowship from the University Malaysia Perlis .She was successful in the interview and was offered the fellowship via a letter but was told to wait for the official offer letter . Till today she did not receive the official offer letter and the contract . When she contacted the University for clarification the university seem to be in the dark about it .

Fed up with that she applied for another fellowship , this time from the University Technical Malaysia , Malacca . Like the earlier case she was successful in the interview and was informed by phone that she was offered the fellowship .She is waiting for the contract from UTech.Malaysia, Melaka . I hope this time what had happened earlier would not repeat itself .