As the end of the first semester of the 2007/2008 academic year approaches at Dhofar University, a number of students from the College of Engineering presented their final projects in various majors. The first group of students majoring in Mechanical Engineering gave an impressive show during the submission of their final project which was basically a competition involving the production of wooden bridges. The students were given the basic dimensions of the bridge they were to produce by their instructor, Dr. Yousef Gharbia. As far as the design of the bridge, that was up to the individual teams. Dr. Gharbia, who is an Assistant Professor and the Chairperson of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, said that this was the third Mechanical Engineering bridge competition that had taken place at the College of Engineering and the idea was to see which team could build the lightest, strongest bridge. He added that the difference between this year’s competition and last year’s is that the bridges last year were made of spaghetti noodles and had to be 0.75 meters long. This year the bridges were built from wooden sticks and had to be 1.5 meters long.

On the 12th of January students majoring in Interior Architecture gave presentations to a panel of faculty members from the Department of Graphic Design, including Mr. Mohammad Abduljabbar, Ass’t Prof. in Interior Architecture. The students are attempting, as the first part of their projects, to document several heritage buildings in Salalah in order to spread knowledge about them to students at the University as well as the general public. The second part of each of their projects involved ‘adaptive re-use’ of the buildings. The students presented detailed drawings and even three dimensional models of the buildings they had studied.

Later in the day the graduating students from the Graphic Design Department presented their graduation projects to an audience in Ibn Rushd Hall consisting of the Chairperson of the Graphic Design Department, GD instructors, staff, faculty, students and guests. The students presented their best pieces of digital art, advertisements, designs, book covers, menus and photographs as well as short films that they had produced over the years of study for their bachelor degrees. It is obvious that these students will be forming the core of a new era of Omani run businesses in Graphic Design in the region. One of them has already been hired by the University and is working in the Public Relations and Information office. The other talented students are planning where and how to use their degrees.