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Professor Ramona Vijay Rasa: Hello everyone and good afternoon. Welcome to the UTS juris doctor and legal studies webinar. My name is Professor Ramona Vijay Rasa and it's a real pleasure to host this evening's discussion. I want to start by acknowledging country. The UTS faculty of law sits on the land of the Gadagal people of the Eora nation on whose ancestral lands are city campus stands. We pay our respects to elders both past, present and emerging and acknowledge them as the traditional custodians of this unseated land. And we also extend this acknowledgement to any first nations people joining tonight's webinar. Today's jurist doctor and legal studies webinar will be recorded. So, please do let us know if you have any issues with that recording which will be made available after tonight's discussion. There is a wonderful team at UTS who put together tonight's webinar and are behind the scenes asking answering any questions you have. So, if you do have questions along the way, please don't hesitate to use the Q&A function any time throughout the webinar to pose your questions to the team. So, as I mentioned, my name is Professor Ramona Vijay Rasa. I'm the juris doctor program head in the faculty of law. I practised as an international women's rights lawyer for around 11 years working internationally on many different continents in many different countries working for international organizations and non-governmental organizations before I moved back to Australia and joined the faculty of law at UTS in 2017. At UTS I continue my work on women's rights. I'm a women's rights scholar actually created the gender legislative index which is a tool that measures the gender responsiveness of legislation and is a collaboration with software engineers from the faculty of information technology. So you can imagine that I I and my work sits very much at home at UTS where we bring together law and technology to develop innovative solutions to global challenges. And I've absolutely loved the last 8 and a half years I've been with UTS. I've been in the jurist doctor program head role now for four years. And in this role, my job is really to help our JD community to help design the programs and support we provide to our JDs and to be a go-to person. So if you choose to join UTS, I very much look forward to welcoming you on campus with the rest of the faculty of law. At UTS, we're very conscious that deciding to undertake a jurist doctor is a big decision. It involves a time commitment. It involves a financial commitment. And many of you are are juggling work and family. I myself did post-graduate studies. So, I know what that juggle is like. And so, we're very conscious that we want to make sure that if you do join UTS to undertake your JD that you feel you're getting the most out of your program and time with us and that we're helping you reach your goals. So we have myself and other support people that I'll talk to talk about along the way to really play that role um in the faculty. So tonight's webinar is really about giving you a sense of what does doing a jurist doctor at UTS law look like. You'll get to know a bit more about our courses. You'll understand what's distinctive about the UTSJD experience and I'll be answering any questions you have along the way around what do assessments look like? what's the workload look like and any tips and advice I've picked up along the way from my time heading the program. It's quite common for law schools to present rankings and rankings um mean different things to different people. So I don't want to dwell on the rankings but one of the rankings that I think is is a particularly interesting one is that we are ranked the first or number one young university. And the reason why I bring out this ranking acknowledging, you know, that rankings, you know, often reflect um different measures and and only tell part of the story is that being the number one young university reflects this real commitment to an innovative and cutting edge student experience. When you learn uh at UTS law, you are going to be employment ready. And I think we're particularly proud that a lot of people in industry, so the law firms out there know that UTS law graduates are employment ready. And part of that is because of the way in which we teach. We use flip classroom, so small group learning. We use innovation in the classroom. We teach very practically. And that's um particular key part of our reputation that you'll get a really practical learning experience. Um you know, we don't teach old school law. We teach the law of today and the law of tomorrow. And I I think that's why I particularly like this um this particular ranking. Our jurist doctor program has however been around for a long time. It was established in 2008 and we started teaching the JD as a post-graduate master of law and legal practice. UTS was actually the first university in New South Wales to teach a JD and the second in Australia. So we've done this for a long time and so we know what we're doing. We are, like other law schools, accredited by the New South Wales Legal Profession Admission Board. That's on us. It's our responsibility to make sure that what we teach you is what's required by the Legal Profession Admission Board so that when you finish your academic studies and your practical legal training, you can become admitted to New South Wales as a lawyer. And we are, of course, accredited by the university. I give you this context, but some of you might know UTS very well. As I said, as a university, while we're young, we've been around for 40 years. You may have studied at UTS or you may have friends or family who've studied at UTS. And I think this reputation for being really practical and cutting edge precedes us. Before I talk about the jurist doctor, and I understand that most of you are here to talk and understand more about the jurist doctor program, I want to tell you a little bit about some of the courses that sit underneath the jurist doctor. And when I say underneath, they're literally stepping stones that can get you towards a JD because everybody might be at a different place in their decision- making. Some of you might be interested in just a component of the law because you're working on an area that engages the law, contracts in your business, or you might have to engage with criminal law or have just an interest in that area. In that case, you might be considering undertaking a graduate certificate in legal studies. This is just a half year full-time or one year of part-time study. Some of you might want a little bit more than that, but not necessarily want to practice. In which case, you might consider a one year full-time graduate diploma in legal studies or a two years full-time in master in a master of legal studies. However, those options do not enable you to practice. So, for those of you who've got your heart set on practicing as a lawyer, the jurist doctor might be better suited to you. and that's why you might have joined this webinar. I will say that it's possible that when you apply to do the jurist doctor at UTS that if you don't meet the academic requirements that you'll get an offer into one of our legal studies programs in order to then transfer into the jurist doctor you just need to complete successfully one semester of study. So it's one of the reasons why we also tell you about these pathways. What these pathways also mean is that if if for whatever reason you start the JD and you think you know what this isn't for me you can graduate at an earlier stage and take out a certificate. So the time is still really well invested. So the rest of the time I'm going to talk to you about the jurist doctor which is the degree to undertake if you want to become a practicing lawyer or get a full legal qualification. So at UTS we offer a range of jurist doctor courses as you can see from the slide. The main one really is the JD program, the jurist doctor, but we have a number of other combined programs that I'll briefly mention, the jurist doctor graduate certificate in trademark law and practice and the jurist doctor masters of intellectual property. And the reason why we offer those two combined programs is we have exceptional expertise in intellectual property. So patents and copyright. We have some of the leading academics and and reading researchers and teachers in intellectual property from across the country at UTS law. And so these are particular offerings where you get to get a JD but also a specialization if you already know that intellectual property is the area for you. We also have a jurist doctor masters of business administration which I must say is um one of my favorite programs that we offer because I think it's such a rare opportunity to get a a law degree and a business degree from two of the leading law schools and business schools in the country. Um I have a law degree myself. I have a PhD but I don't have an MBA. And I think if this kind of combined offering had been available when I was a student, it would have really attracted to me just to have those very exceptional and um employment attractive um qualifications when you enter the market. So I just want to let you know there's these other com combinations that might be of interest to you. When you undertake a jurist doctor, many of you would know that you also need to undertake practical legal training. So, you do your jurist doctor, which is the degree that you undertake at UTS, and that is a three-year full-time degree. You do your practical legal training, and as I'll talk about in a moment, lucky for everyone, we offer PLT at UTS. And then with the academic and the practical qualifications, you can apply to the legal profession admission board to then get admitted to the Supreme Court of New South Wales. And that's the general pathway to becoming a lawyer in New South Wales. and it's very similar in other states as well. But what we offer at UTS, as I mentioned, is practical legal training. So we offer a JD and we offer the PLT. The UTS PLT has been run um by UTS for many many years. And the teachers who teach into the PLT program have over 25 years of compine combined experience teaching PLT, which you can roughly take over a six-month period. PLT is also taught at on the UTS campus, but there's also aspects taught online and there's a a practical component as well. So, you get your real life experience um doing client interviews and moot courts and this is a photo from the UTS moot court in a new building, but then you also accumulate um practical experience by working with a firm or some kind of legal practice to accumulate the hours. The reason why I talk about PLT is earlier I mentioned that you need to undertake a jurist doctor and you need to undertake practical legal training. UTS also offers an exceptional program which is a combined jurist doctor graduate certificate in professional legal practice. So rather than doing a three-year JD and then your PLT, the JD, graduate certificate in professional legal practice or the JD accelerate as we call it, is the fastest way for you to become an admitted lawyer in New South Wales. Um, and we offer both and the reason why we can offer both is we have a qualification that has been um, accepted by the legal profession admission board as the fastest track to become a lawyer. Um, and I think this is a particularly standout degree. And of all the combined jurist doctor programs at UTS, this is the most popular. In our JD degree, we have 15 core subjects, five electives, and one legal theory. So, I want to get into helping you understand what it actually looks like to undertake the JD itself. So, typically you start with the core subjects. Now, these core subjects are required by the legal profession admission board. Wherever you study law, whether it's at UTS or somewhere else, you will cover this content because it's required for you to become admitted. The this is called the priestly 11. The 11 core subjects that are required to become a lawyer. The things you know about already, things like criminal law, contract law that you might have heard of, property law, evidence. Um and so they form the priestly 11 which are taught over 15 core subjects at UTS. This is typically what you'll do in your first one to two years at UTS. Once you've completed your priestly 11 and this is a sample of what that might look like. So in year one you do your foundation subjects. In year two you do your mid sort of tier slightly more difficult subjects. And by year three you get into some really complex subjects such as remedies and company law. Then you get two electives and in the jurist doctor program you do five electives plus a compulsory legal theory. So I want to tell you a little bit about the electives and as you can see we offer some some subjects in the summer as well. So autumn, spring and summer. I want to tell you a little bit about what those electives choices look like and we can we can answer more questions about a part-time and a full-time option as we go. And I think what's really exciting about UTS's electives opt options is just the sheer diversity. We have what are called elective streams and we teach the electives um a range of electives across all of those streams. Some of you at this stage might already be very clear what kind of law you want to practice. You've got your heart set on becoming a family lawyer or a criminal lawyer in which case you would probably pick all electives across that stream. Perhaps health, family, and children's rights. and you might study elder law, um disability in the law, family and children's rights. Um if you've got your set heart set on becoming a private international lawyer, a private lawyer, you might do banking and finance and commercial law and introduction to tax. Some of you may be keen to become a lawyer, but not quite sure what kind of law you want to practice, in which case you might want to choose electives across the stream. And I think what's really exciting for you is just how much diversity we have in our electives offering. What's also particularly unique to UTS is our research and experiential subjects. So you might um be a particularly exceptional student and really keen to do further research, in which case you can do an honors thesis of 5,000 words as an elective, as a research subject. You might be keen in your electives to get some really practical experience. And we have a practical legal placement domestically, but also a global practical legal placement. And I think this is something that is really exciting and one that I would have picked. And the reason why this one is particularly popular with JD students is I have a lot of JDs who come to me and say, "Look, I don't have family and law. I don't have contacts already. How do I get my foot in the And I'll often say to them, why don't you choose as one of your electives the the global internship program or the local internship program? And in this particular elective, we actually place 30 students with 30 organizations. So if you come to us and say, I'm really interested in banking and finance, we can get you a placement with Westpak. You might be interested in technology in the law and we can get you a placement with Allen's or Neo Logic. you might be interested in um working for a legal center in which case we'll try to arrange a placement with you for Red Fern and that actually counts as one of your electives. So you get credit and experience all at the same time. We have the equivalent of the local internship program at a global level. So we also have students who then go on to do a global internship program. I recently had a student who did a local internship with a law firm and she said, "I had such a good time. I want to do the equivalent internship with their global global Hong Kong branch so I can really get to know the law firm." So she did the local internship in Sydney. She went and spent a winter break in the Hong Kong branch and then came back to Sydney already so well equipped to try to get a job in the longer term with that law firm because she understands both the domestic practice but also what they're doing in a regional office. Um, so that's just a taster of some of our electives that we offer. We also have, if it suits you, the opportunity for our JDs to spend a semester abroad. Um, I spent a semester um, two semesters in Canada. It's a great opportunity if it suits your lifestyle and your work commitments. If it doesn't, you can do all of your electives here um, in in Sydney at UTS. So, I just want to go back and explain what this all looks like as a package. As I showed on the previous slide, some of you might be ready for full-time study. You want to get the fastest track to um law and to finish your degree to become a lawyer. And you might have the um financial situation and the working situation that enables you to study full-time. In which case, this is what your study program would look like. You would do three years with us full-time and study across autumn and spring. What's also very special about UTS is we offer some subjects in the summer. that includes core subjects as well as electives. And it's not every law school that offers this, and I'm pleased we can because it can just make the JD a little bit easier where students can lighten their load during the semester and take a subject or two over summer. However, some of you might be working full-time or part-time but not be able to commit to a full-time study load. In which case, this is what your UTS jurist stocks will look like. It's likely that you'll finish between five to five and a half years, and you'll spread over those subjects across the the years. Some of your you'll be able to take some subjects and some electives over summer to help your load, but it's perfectly fine for you to work at this pace. Again, I think what makes UTS pretty flexible and unique is that you don't have to enroll in a full-time or part-time option. You can choose your load depending on your own personal commitments, what's happening at home and what's happening at work. So, for example, if you work as a as a project manager and you have a particularly busy 2026 ahead, you might think, you know what, this is the program for me. I'm going to pace myself and do two subjects a session. Then comes 2027 and you think, I've got a pretty light load. I can take on more subjects. You can simply increase your enrollment load and do more subjects in those sessions and go up to a closer to a full-time load. So, we're really flexible in our offering. I see we have a couple of questions here that relate to the study. Um and and one of the questions is about are there any core subjects offered during the summer session. We do offer core sum subjects during the summer session. Um and again we do this because we think it's enables our jurist doctor students in particular just to lighten the load a little bit of their study. Um so for example in the upcoming session we offer this subject here which is normally studied in year two called introduction to property and commercial law. I've got lots of JDs taking that subject in the summer. So they do what would they would otherwise do during the session over the summer just to lighten their session load. Another subject we offer in the subject in the summer tends to be our legal theory subject. So feminist juristprudence or law and literature it is compulsory according to the legal profession mission board to do a legal theory subject and by taking one of those legal theory subjects in the summer it again just lightens our students loads. Another question that I've seen come up is what does the working week look like? So, I'll explain what the work looks like, you know, the week by week for a JD student in relation to, for example, this full-time load or this part-time load, sorry. So, as I said, the vast majority of our students do studies and work at the same time. So, for those of you thinking, oh, I'm not sure if this is for me. I've got a really heavy workload. You would not be alone. What's fantastic about UTS is the flexibility in our timetable. So, we

teach anywhere from 8: 00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. Monday to Friday, and we teach in small groupoup classes. So, what that means is if you're taking, for example, ethics, law, and justice. It's a 3-hour subject at the moment. You might think, look, I'm working Monday to Friday. I'm going to take a Monday afternoon class, and I'll enroll in the 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. class. Um, so you'll go to work

from say 8: 00 a.m. or 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Take a break, maybe have a bite to eat, come to campus,

and come to a 6: 00 to 9:00 p.m. class. You might also be taking foundations of law, which is twice a week, 2 hours a week. And so on a Tuesday or a Thursday evening, you'll do a class and you think, you know what, I don't want to come to campus for those two classes. For those two classes, I'll see if there's an online option. And so for foundations of law on a Tuesday and Thursday, perhaps from the office or perhaps from home,

you'll log in from 7 to 9: 00 p.m. two nights a week. So that's what the study week looks like. At UTS, we aim to offer at least each of these core subjects online once a week, and they tend to be in the evening. So if after work you prefer to go home and not be on campus, that's completely fine. You can try to enroll in an online option. I would encourage you if you can in your first year to try to at least be on campus for one of these classes just to meet fellow JDs and attend you know the other excellent programs we offer our JD students on campus but because we're a flexible degree we do try to offer as I said each of these core subjects online just to not force you to be on campus if it's a little bit difficult to get out of work on time and make it to the city if work's not in the city or if for example you're already working from home and you prefer in that particular session to study in the evening. One of the other questions I'm often asked in terms of what does that work week look like for the students is how do I fit in my reading and and my study. We've previously asked this question to our JD students and a student often said to me look what I try to do is set aside Sunday to do my reading. So they work Monday to Friday and they attend their classes in the evening and Sunday is their reading day to be better prepared before class. This particular student said to me, "Look, I do as much reading as possible. I take all my notes on a Sunday, but between five and six before I head to class, I'll recap my notes and I might instead of rereading the textbook, reread a quick guide to the subject just to refresh my mind on some of the questions that might be covered in class. So, their core study day is Sunday. They'll do a bit of a refresher in the 45 minutes before class and attend class say on the 6 to9 on a Monday and Tuesdays and Thursdays for those four hours two two hours at a time um logging into an online class. That's what a a a UTS JD experience might look like week by week for the 12week session. As I mentioned we have, you know, enormous array of of elective subjects. I really am incredibly impressed by just what diversity we offer in our electives and I think it really sets our program apart. Of course, we have experts in certain fields and I think one of our expertise certainly lies in intellectual property as I mentioned. I work in human rights, particularly women's rights and I think our experiential subjects are also incredible and really set us apart. And I think what enables us to teach such a diversity of subjects is that we the academic staff at UTS is made up of leaders and experts from across the field. And it's these leaders and experts who are in front of you in the classroom. Um there's associate professor Jane Wangman who teaches foundations of law. She often coordinates the first year subject. She's also one of Australia's leading scholars on family and domestic violence and has been really influential in shaping domestic violence law around coercive control. To give you another example, Professor Thalia Anthony is also one of Australia's leading scholars on indigenous people in the law, particularly around issues of incarceration and death in custody. Um, another colleague of mine, Professor Joelen Riley, is not only a teacher of labor law, but she's also one of the the leading scholars of employment law, has written most of the textbooks and is also really influential in shaping um new regulation around the gig economy and Uber workers, Uber drivers and and and workers in the gig economy. In fact, one of her books co-authored with the UTS colleague was directly influential in shaping how the courts were defining who is an as a employee versus who is a contractor in ways that have really protected workers in the gig economy. Um, and so we've got the people teaching you in our classrooms are not only the legal leading scholars in their field, but they're actually really shaping law in Australia, which I think makes for an incredibly practical and exciting experience for you as students at at UTS. Um, there's a quick question here around is the program only for study in New South Wales? As I mentioned, we do our best to ensure that each of those core subjects are offered online. So it's possible if you're in regional New South Wales or remote area or perhaps even another state to take an online subject. It's not a wholly online degree. So you need to be first off the mark to enroll into the online options. We also offer many online electives although not all. So if you can come to campus from time to time to take say an elective in a block mode taught for three days over the weekend. Um you can enroll in as many online subcore subjects as possible. take an online elective when you can make it to New South Wales. And again, I think that's, you know, the flexibility that we offer in our in our JD program. Um, before I talk a bit more about that flexibility, I'll talk about some of the other key features of what we offer here. And one of them is this um, honest thesis I mentioned before. You know, we really value high achievers. And I think what makes the UTS program really exceptional is not only do we offer a lot of flexibility. We appeal to people who are really working, have a demanding family life, but we also appeal to high achievers. And our high achievers with an outstanding wham of over 75 also get to take an a research thesis. It's optional as an elective and they get to graduate with distinction. Um that graduation with distinction appears on your transcript. It's mentioned on graduation day. And what it allows you to do is to to do an extensive piece of writing as a research thesis supervised by one of those faculty members that I mentioned before. I've supervised um nearly 10 thesis, two of which have been published in law journals as I've supported the students to publish. So I think it's something that can set you apart. It can set your CV apart. But it can also enable you to say, you know what, I've been in working in media and communications most of my life or medical health law. And I want to leverage my experience so far in my first degree in my law degree and really specialize in medicine and the law or mediacoms and the law. And the thesis really allows you to do that. Or if you've got your heart set on a particular area, again, the thesis is a space where you can really specialize um and set your CV apart. So, I think that's another one of the the really special offerings at at UTS. One of the nice things about the way in which law is taught at UTS, and again, I think this is quite different from what some of you might have experienced in your undergraduate studies, is we do small class learning, what's called flip learning. So it's very unlikely at UTS law that you will be sitting in a lecture of hundreds of people. Rather we teach in small groups. I teach typically ethics, law and justice in first year and public international law which is a later year subject. And my classes are between 30 and 40 students. In fact the last time I taught ethics law and justice I had 33 students in the classroom. What does this mean? It means I get to know every student in the room. I get to know every student by name. It means we can have really rigorous and deep class debates and conversations about the legal material. The students can do small group work and learn from each other. And what it enables is a really deep learning experience. It also allows for a very practical learning experience. In the subject I teach, ethics, law, and justice, one of the assessments requires students to work in groups and defend a lawyer who's accused of professional misconduct. The students stand before the class and defend that lawyer and the rest of the students turn into the tribunal or court overhearing the case and make a determination over whether that particular lawyer was guilty or not and should be reprimanded in some way. And again, I think this is not only facilitated because of our small group learning, but it also means that our students acquire exceptionally strong practical skills and the industry, so the law firms of the future or the government bodies that might be hiring you or the corporations that might be hiring you for the in-house lawyers know that UTS graduates have the practical skills that mean on day one, you're ready to go. Um, and I it also makes for a much more enjoyable learning experience. I've already talked quite a little bit about flexibility at UTS. As I've mentioned before, there's no full-time or part-time track. You can really move between them depending on what's going on in your personal life. So, if you have a particularly busy period at home or at work, you can take fewer electives. If you think, you know, this upcoming semester I've got a pretty light load at work, I can take on an extra subject and stay on track. You can do that. We have that flexibility. Um, it's very easy to work part-time or full-time while doing a UTS law degree. Uh, core subjects are offered all day and in the evening. We try to offer as many core as possible online to enable those of you to log in from work or in the evening from home. Our electives are structured as much as we can um throughout the semester if that suits you, but also there are electives offered over the summer in evening and block mode. We also enable our students to take a leave of absence. Should this be something you need, you can take up to four semesters of leave of absence during your jurist doctor. Students do use this opportunity um and we support our students to apply for that and go go through that process. I think co 19 showed us that you never know what's going to happen and so we offer the leave of absence to be able to work around people's real lives. Um so really at UTS you have a lot of choice to study in ways without complicated paperwork and complicated streams um with much hybrid delivery. I want to talk a little bit about the JD plus program and one of the questions that popped up online is do you have a support for people who who don't come from a legal background. Um some of you may not have studied um legal studies or have no context of law. You might not have come across any law experience during your time um in your current job. That's completely fine. It's also completely fine if you have not studied for some time. Our jurist doctor community is very diverse. Um we have students who have done their undergraduate degree and decide, you know what, I've always wanted to do law. I'm getting in there straight away and they roll straight into their JD program. We have other students who have been out of um out of their undergraduate studies for years, sometimes decades, and then go back and do law. So, our cohort is aged anywhere between their their sort of early 20s through to their 60s. There's a lot of diversity. So, what we try to do is recognize that if students haven't studied for some time, they may be feeling a little bit anxious and have a feel that they have a gap in skills. And that is all addressed through our JD Plus program. One of the key features of the JD plus program are master classes in legal writing and legal research. They're particularly targeted at first year, but we are hoping to introduce advanced level subjects as well. These JD legal writing and legal research classes are only available to our JD community and they really are there to help bridge any gaps or uncertainties our JD students have. Some of our JDs also say look I have come from a completely unrelated profession. I'm working as a personal assistant. I'm working in a um as a as a physical trainer, personal trainer. I'm working in a travel agency. These are real examples from real JD students. How do I get my foot in the door? Well, one of the best ways to get your foot in the door is to connect. And we at UTS enable those industry connections through a JD careers panel and networking series as part of our JD Plus program. The photo at the top there that you can see is actually from one of our panels. We bring back our JD alumni because there's something special about graduating from UTS and there's something special about connecting alumni from UTS with all of our students. Um so these JD careers panels and networking nights are an opportunity for our JD alumni to come back and talk about what it was like studying the JD at UTS. If they have any tips, how did they get their foot in the door and what are they doing? Um the panelists you can see there have such a diversity of careers. Some of them are working in house. One of them's legal council at um New South Wales TA. One of them works for Westpak. Um a couple work for mid-tier law firms. And so they came back and they come back every session very generous with their time which I think says a lot about their their love of UTS to share tips and their experiences and also to literally swap contacts because that's sometimes the best way to get your foot in the door. Um that event takes place every session in the UTS dedicated post-graduate lounge which is another feature of our JD plus program. We recognize how important it is to build a JD community. So our JD students know that they're not alone so that you can create study groups so you can create WhatsApp groups to swap tips and tricks so that our older JD students who are more experienced can mentor our newer JD students who are getting started. At the start of each session, we have a wonderful post-graduate welcome night which is hosted by the dean in that lounge. The lounge has a capacity for over 80 people and on a post-graduate welcome night the lounge is overflowing. Um so it's it's really a highlight of the JD calendar um and a great way to start the session. So I suppose the message here is to say you are not alone if you do your JD at UTS and we have this really dedicated exceptional JD plus program to help guide you along the way um and to make the most of those experiences outside of the classroom. Um so that's just some ways about how we support students not only who don't have a law or legal studies background but also how we ensure that our program helps you get prepared for legal industry. Just noticing a couple more questions. There's two questions here that I want to answer now. One of them is why would you choose the regular JD over the JD accelerate? I think this is an excellent question. The JD Accelerate is the program I mentioned earlier. It is the way of doing the entire full-time JD plus the PLT in three years. It's the fastest track to becoming a lawyer. And for some students, that's your goal. You know, you've always wanted to do this or you've decided now is the time and you want the quickest pathway to become a lawyer. It does require demanding study. It it it is best achieved with full-time study in autumn, in spring, and over summer. So, it really is best for those students who aren't de having a demanding workload where you need to work full-time and study at the same time. If you have a demanding family life or a job that you need to maintain during your JD studies, which is obviously completely understandable for financial security among other reasons, then probably choosing the regular JD would work best for you. Luckily for you, we have both programs. If you actually start in one of the programs and decide this is not for you, it's also possible to transfer from the regular JD into the JD accelerate and we can assist you through that process. There is also a question here which is what does an ideal JD candidate look like? That's a really interesting question because I think um the JD students I've supported along the way are so diverse. Uh just last week I hosted a jurist doctor town hall. It's the second ever town hall that we've hosted to get feedback from our students to say what do you want in your program because really we want to design a program that best supports our needs and responds to to the interests of our students. And I love that we're able to take that feedback and put it into practice. I held the first town hall when I first took on this role four years ago. Um got the feedback from existing JD students and designed the JD plus program in direct response to the feedback we got from students. So last week's town hall will be shaping all of your JD experiences if you decide to come to UTS and that's all the feedback from your existing JD cohort. And at that town hall, we had such a diversity of students, international students, domestic students, students with family who are sort of juggling the school holidays right now through to students who finished their undergraduate degree fairly recently. There really is no ideal JD candidate other than someone I think who has a passion for the law. Um, it is a demanding degree. It does require a lot of reading. um as someone who has practiced commercial law, practiced as an international women's rights lawyer and now works as a as a women's rights scholar in law and and really uses my research to try to change the way we think about law and law making in Australia. I think the law is an incredibly powerful tool. I've always wanted to be a lawyer and I'm so glad I picked this pathway, but I also know that it's demanding um both practice but also the study. And so I think the ideal student is someone who has a genuine passion for the law because that's what it's going to take to get through through the demand. But if you have that passion, which I'm assuming you do because you've joined tonight's webinar, then I think you are indeed the ideal candidate. A couple more things about UTS. I don't want to hold people. It's um um in October already with daylight savings and a beautiful evening here in Sydney, but I do want to tell you a little bit about what sets UTS apart. Um we are the University of technology Sydney and you know we're at a moment where technology is disrupting the sector for some you can think of it as a worry I think for UTS we think of it as exciting we spend a lot of time teaching our students about how they need to be better prepared as lawyers engaging with technology when I graduated from law over two decades ago I did something called discovery I would sit through a room as a legal um parallegal with fellow parallegals and we would read PDF documents to try to find the evidence that we needed to make a case. This is something that an AIdriven technology can do much faster than we ever did. It can comb through the PDFs, find the keywords and save a lot of menial tasks that lawyers often do. So technology is transforming law and it's important for our students to know that. But technology also creates new opportunities. there are new areas that need to be regulated, AI, copyright, um, and new and emerging technologies. There's ways in which we can use technology to create better legal services and to do lawyering better, and our students need to know how to use those tools. Um, and so far at UTS, we are powered by technology. We we think technology will change the profession and we need to be ready. We teach technology- based electives such as disruptive tech. We teach technology moots. We engage between tech and social justice which is the other key pillar at UTS through tech and social justice week. But we also have internships in technology based um law programs such as at Landon and Landers Lander and Rogers law tech hub and law path. Um so I think this is an opportune moment for those interested in law and tech and who want to be on the cutting edge of this new field of law to pick UTS as the place to study. The other key pillar that you know people often say is in our DNA is social justice. Um and obviously someone like me I I work on women's rights. So social justice is key to what I do. However, we have a lot of JD students who think you know I'm not I don't want to practice in social justice. I do want to become a commercial lawyer or I want to work for government or I want to work in house but I am keen to give back. And I think what's really special at UTS is the Brennan justice and leadership program. It enables students who who don't necessarily want to practice in social justice to still participate in social justice activities. It's named after Bren Sir Gerard Brennan, who's pictured in the photo. He passed away relatively recently. We have Sir Gerard's Brennan's robes on level 14 of the UTS faculty of law, which is the student faculty with the moo courts and the interview rooms and the student study spaces. It's a real honor that his family dedicated his robes and gave them to UTS. I think is a sign of the significance of this program. Our students volunteer in this program and and earn credits. They participate in debates and discussions and write reflection notes and they graduate from UTS law as Brennan justice and leadership program scholars. We have our law awards night next week. It's a very prestigious night and I'm really looking forward to attending. There are five JD students receiving awards next week, subject prizes as well as three receiving prizes from the brilliant justice and leadership program. So this might also be something for you. Um just if you do come to UTS, um I think it's important for you to know that you are not alone in your studies. We have a director of students who's a who's available to help all of our students with questions around enrollment um or if they're just struggling with managing their studies. Um so it's always an option for you to get support from UTS. For those of you who might be struggling a little with around English language or who haven't studied for some time, we also have the helps language program for you on campus. Um we have a UTS career service which co-organize all of those fabulous careers and networking events and also a UTS student services for those with accessibility, counseling and health needs. So you know I think it's a really holistic support service that you get on campus as well. Um, the fees are available for you on on the page here, but do use the QR code to get the up-to-date fee calculator. I want to say a few things about fees before I answer some more of the questions that have come in online. Um, I'm really pleased that in recent years, UTS has been able to offer more and more Commonwealth supported program place, Commonwealth supported places. We know this is an expensive undertaking and so it's important for us to offer as many CSP positions as possible. They are currently open now on a rolling basis and if you have a GPA of 5.5 out of seven and above, you should be entitled to a CSP place. So please get your applications in as soon as possible. Some of you might have semi completed halfway through your application. We don't want to run out of CSPs. So get them in so we can assess your CSP and make you an offer with a CSP place. Some of you may however have not had the best undergraduate experience for whatever reason. And I understand that your GPA may not quite be high enough to get a CSP place. Well, for those students who are nonCSP holders, you are able to compete for a dean's academic merit jurist doctor scholarship. Once you have completed the equivalent of 46 credits, which is pretty much the equivalent of first year, we award five jurist doctor deans academic merit scholarships each session to the highest performing students based on your WHAM. And again, you won't be competing against the CSP holder. This is just for nonCSP holders. So far, we have awarded 20 of these scholarships, and it gives the students who receive these scholarships a 20% fee reduction for the remainder of their degree. And we do this because for us it's important to be able to help our students to manage the financial difficulty that might be entailed in undertaking a JD. It's it's just another way of us showing our understanding of what you're trying to juggle in making this new next stage in in your career. Also, if you've studied at UTS before, you get a 10% discount as part of our alumni advantage program. So, applications are open now. For domestic students, they close in on the 25th of January. For international students, they close on the 30th of November, but don't wait. Um, they are on a rolling basis and I know some of you would have um started your applications already. So, I do encourage you to to complete them as soon as possible. Um, I do want to answer a few of the questions online. There's some questions around um the CSP requirement. We do tend to focus on the bachelor's degree when calculating the GPA for the Commonwealth supported placement and the requirement to enter the JD. Um, but I would say get your application in and let us do that um evaluation of your your WHAM or your GPA behind the scenes. If you don't have a high enough WHAM to get into the JD, we always have the option of offering you a place in the legal studies program. You can do one semester of study. All of that is credited towards the JD and then simply transfer into the JD program. So don't worry if you don't feel you have the CSP, the requirements for um to get into the program. If you're unsure if you have the requirements to get a CSP, leave that with us. We'll do the calculation and you can wait for your offer which we'll try to get to you as soon as possible. The JD full-time program is three years. it is between five and four and a half to five and a half years part-time because a lot of students do do the um summer subjects to to keep on track. Um there's a question here about completing a final bachelor's degree and waiting for the um outcome to apply. Um I will ask my team to get back to you on that particular question. I have had students apply where they're still finishing because they're keen to get in and then usually we can make a confirmed offer once you get your final transcript. Um the course cuts will not affect the jurist doctor. So please don't hesitate, you know, to join this fabulous faculty. I have to say of all the wonderful jobs I've had, I've traveled the world as an international women's rights lawyer, I've absolutely loved the eight years I've spent working in this faculty. It's a fabulous faculty. Um so none of that's changed. Please do come along and um apply and and join to to to come and get the UTSJD experience. Um I think I've already explained what a typical JD week looks like. I will add that you know sometimes we calculate that each subject is around 130 hours of study and that includes contact hours, reading and assessments over the 12week period. So you can calculate that's roughly about tw 10 to 12 hours a week depending on how fast you read, how effective you are, how quick you are as a notetaker, how well you understand that particular subject. Obviously some subjects will be more demanding than others, but you should expect um around five to seven contact hours a week, probably about closer to the seven and at least a few hours of reading a week. Um and again it depends on how efficient you are at reading and note takingaking. Um and and um how much spare time you have to give to to reading and and your your commute to campus. Um typical contact hours would be between six and seven hours a week. Um so I think I've answered most of the questions. Um if there's any other questions that you have that we haven't been able to answer, we will get back to you um by email. It's been a real pleasure to share with you a little bit about the JD experience at UTS. Um, as I said, I've been in this role for four years. It's a wonderful JD community. It's a diverse JD community. Um, and based on last week's town hall, it's a really happy JD community because we do our best to support our students to reach this next goal in the next stage of their careers and their lives. Um, so I hope I've given you plenty to think about. Um, if you have further questions, feel free to contact us. Otherwise, I very much look forward to meeting many of you on campus when you start your UTS juris doctor um, next autumn 2026. See you all then. Thank you very much.

Christine Giles: 

Hello everyone. Welcome to our webinar. We'll be starting very very shortly. I just wanted to let you know that we are recording for the benefit of those who weren't able to attend and join us live, but also if you want to have a have a review of the session. My name is Christine Giles. I'm the head of the program. My background I was a barrister for many years before specializing in migration law uh in the days when lawyers could register as migration agents. I practiced both in the commercial and the not For profit areas. uh I was I filled the role of the immigration ombudsman for four years in in Queensland and I've been involved in both the graduate certificate and the graduate diploma of migration law and practice for oh goodness nearly 15 years now. I'm really excited that you're able to join us tonight. especially to see so many of you interested in starting our program and you guys are actually going to be the very first people to get a glimpse at our brand new program that's commencing in autumn 2026. So I hope you'll be as excited to learn about it as I am to present it for you. As always at UTS, I acknowledge and pay my respects to elders past and present, acknowledging them as the traditional custodians of knowledge for this land, uh, land that was never ceded. And I myself are joining from the lands of the Agamba people. Um, with our online program, we tend to be joining from all around Australia. We have a different acknowledgement of country map where we uh recognize the many many different uh traditional owners of the lands in the places where we are joining from. Now there is a Q&A function enabled. Please you're very welcome to use the Q&A function at any time. We have the lovely Samantha and Leonie here who will assist you with anything student admin. So questions about enrolment, questions about fees, they can help you. If your questions relate specifically to the graduate diploma, the content, the way it's delivered, uh I'll be able to deal with those questions. Normally I have one of our teachers here or even our program director, uh director of professional programs here with us tonight, but you've just got me um partially because I'm the one who knows everything about the brand new program. But what that means is that some of those questions will wait till the end of the session and if I haven't already covered them in the preceding slides, of course, I'll answer them for you then. So, we will be looking at who needs to be registered to become a migration agent, how you go about doing that, including the infamous capstone assessment, um why choose UTS, an overview of our brand new course and some suggested study plan options. uh a glimpse at our teaching team. Um I'm going to give you an exclusive preview of the build site of the migration agent skill subject, our brand new first subject. Uh I'll talk to you about the workload in the course. Um highlight a few of the special things back on that UTS. Um particular our communicating with clients project. Um there's a slide on fees and then I'll get to your Q&A. So who needs to be registered? Well, anyone really who doesn't hold a current legal Practising Certificate. So, let me just run this poll so that I can see whether we have any um lawyers in the room with us. If you are a lawyer holding a legal practising certificate, uh you will find that you will be able to um apply for exemption from two of the subjects in our program if you don't already know that um because since the 22nd of March 2021 um we've had deregulation it's been called which means that lawyers not only do they not have to register as migration agents but they're not allowed to register as migration agents anymore. They have been excluded from the profession. But that doesn't mean that they are excluded from providing migration advice. They are able to give immigration advice provided that they hold a legal practising certificate. Okay. Thank you. I'm going to end that poll. Thank you for answering both questions. Good to see um that there are yesses and nos for both questions. So apart from lawyers who hold legal current Australian legal practising certificates um there are some exceptions close family members politicians government officials in the course of their duty. So someone who works for the immigration department for example. Otherwise it is a very very serious criminal offence for anybody to provide immigration assistance unless they are a registered migration agent. All right. It's a very very serious offence. Um I think it carries a maximum 10 year imprisonment penalty. Um, so and as you're a student, if you decide to enrol and go ahead and uh and start learning, everyone will have a migration law problem. They'll want you to help them with it. And you have to be very very careful to say, "I'm sorry, I'm not yet registered or I'm not legally able to provide immigration assistance." All right. So that's who needs to be registered. So becoming a migration agent starts with this program. Now as I've mentioned, lawyers can be exempt from two subjects. So just because lawyers can provide immigration assistance without registering as a migration advisor or migration agent doesn't mean they should do that. Uh unless they actually learn something about it. It would be absolutely negligent. It is probably apart from taxation law the most complex area of law. It's not normally covered in undergraduate law degrees and so we do have a lot of lawyers coming who are wanting to practise in the area um but realize that they need to actually gain some specific content knowledge about what they're doing. Now, not all lawyers will be lodging visa applications. Um, to be frank, they might even not even get the clients to be able to do that because migration agents are much more um much less expensive than lawyers and probably more experienced at lodging visa applications. Lawyers will be looking at the more complex when things go wrong. uh perhaps doing tribunal appearances or even court appearances, writing comprehensive submissions for people who don't pay pass the character test, things like that. Um so welcome to those lawyers who are interested. You are able to be exempted from the first and last subject. You should make your application for RPL um recognition for prior learning before you enrol in those subjects. But strictly speaking, there's a census date. As long as you get it sorted out before the census date, you can still withdraw and not have to worry about those subjects. So, six subjects if you're a lawyer with a current practising certificate and do not intend to sit the capstone assessment. I say that just in case you're thinking about giving up your practising certificate and registering as an agent. If you're going to register as an agent, you have to sit the capstone assessment and you cannot be exempt from those two subjects because they are the subjects that cover the content that migration agents need to know. So they cover the code of conduct, running uh a migration practice as a migration agent. Now many of you are probably aware of the capstone assessment. That is an independent assessment. So it doesn't have anything to do with UTS, our graduates go on to sit that assessment and unless they pass that assessment, which means obtaining 65% in both the written and oral component or more um they're not able to proceed to step three to register as a migration advisor. So it's completely independent of UTS. It's conducted for the MARA for the Office of the Migration Agents Registration Authority by Legal Training Australia Proprietary Limited. There are three intakes a year and LTA recommends two to three months of intensive preparation for the capstone after completing the graduate diploma in migration law and practice. Now, a little advantage um for those of you who choose to enrol in our program, LTA uses Canvas learning management system as we do. And so, our graduates have an advantage as far as that goes because they're already familiar with Canvas uh when they start the preparation program with Legal Training Australia and when they have to undertake their assessments, online written and online oral assessments. Now there are a number of other requirements that you have to meet. Step one and step two relate to what are called the professional uh the prescribed knowledge requirements. Right? But there are other requirements and uh we have a slide coming up on those because I want you to be aware of those. So why choose our program? Well, we have a really big focus on authentic practice-based work. That's how you learn to be a migration advisor. So, we combine theory with practice, but everything you do is authentic, right? They're accessible. They're not all um they're not all accessible. There are non-accessible tasks as well, but everything is designed to prepare you prepare you for professional practice. So, we have and you'll see a slide coming up with the teaching team, but we have a combination of lawyers and migration agents. Um, you need lawyers to teach a law course. It's part of the rules for um law faculties. uh but I think it is so important that you are working in your practical subjects where you are learning about the criteria for each and every visa subclass. It is so important that you are working with migration agents who are at the coal front who are on the ground who can tell you about the issues and the hurdles and the obstacles they're facing every day in their professional practices. Uh and we do focus also on capstone preparation. So throughout the program you'll be doing capstone preparation activities but your very final module in the final subject migration law and practice is a capstone preparation module where we have workshops on preparing for the oral component workshops on preparing for the written component and you do lots of practise for the orals practise for the written um so it is it is very flexible and I'll give you a little bit more information about um the flexibility of the course. But as I said, I just wanted in relation to step three to make sure that everyone is aware of the other requirements. If you are not, please go on to the MARA website and familiarise yourself with those requirements. There is no point um committing all the time, effort, and expense to obtaining this qualification if you have a criminal history that is going to preclude you from being able to register as a migration agent or if you are not an Australian citizen um permanent resident or a New Zealand citizen holding a a special category visa, right? because only those three categories can register. Now, we do have students in the program who are on their temporary partner visas waiting for their permanent visas. That's fine except it's a bit more expensive. I think you have to pay international student fees. Um that that's not a problem. It's not going to stop you getting into this program, but you need to be aware that you're going to have to have that permanent residence before you can register. So as I said don't embark on this without knowing your end goal what you have to achieve to get through. Now this is our course as I said six subjects for lawyers eight for non-lawyers in autumn 2026 we are offering the first three subjects migration agent skills introduction to migration and citizenship law and Australia's visa system. These three subjects give you the fundamentals you need to go on to the more complex uh content that we're going to cover in the subjects following. So in Australia's visa system, you are introduced to all the different visa subclasses and classes and we look at what we call common concepts. So who can be included in a visa application? what the health requirements are, when a sponsor is required, what the sponsor's requirements are. And we finish that subject with bridging visas, which is very very important uh compliance visa that keeps our clients lawful uh if they for example have applied for another visa or they're awaiting for a tribunal hearing or a court hearing. So we cover some very important fundamental material in those first three subjects. Um the first subject itself is really just a little mini law course where we're getting you up to speed on um on what you need to know to be able to solve legal problems because migration law problems are legal problems and you need to know how to solve them. We look at as I said earlier the code of conduct so that you know what the requirements are for communicating with your clients and we our assessment task in that subject is uh a client consultation and so we start off with how to conduct a client consultation in uh 78300 you'll be looking at uh writing a memorandum to your supervisor 78301 is what we call a subsequent consultation with a client. So, we do oral exams in almost every subject, not all of them, but we get you, we give you lots and lots of practice. So, by the time you complete the program, not only are you ready to nail that capstone oral um but you are set up for professional practice so that you know how to um conduct a client consultation, how to take instructions from a client. So work and study visas as it sounds like we deal with all the specifics. So all the law, all the policy, all the procedure for all the different types of work visas and student visas and student guardian visas. Um the next subject looks at all your family visas, parent, child, partner as well as refugee and humanitarian and miscellaneous visas. Module 4 covers everything you haven't covered elsewhere. Most of those visas in miscellaneous visas are not visas that migration agents would apply for their clients, but it doesn't mean you don't need to know about them because you'll have clients coming to you who are on those visas um who want to know uh what pathway is available for them. But we also look at things like um resident return visas and visitor visas as part of that miscellaneous fees module. and they of course um may well be uh visas that you will be dealing with in practice. Compliance and cancellation is my favorite subject. Um it's basically what can go wrong for people in their dealings with the department. So it's all about all the different uh bases for cancelling visas, for refusing visas, when people can be detained, when they can be removed from Australia and uh as I said all the things that can go wrong for people. uh whereas the next subject which is a bit of a companion subject um if you can do them together I think that they complement each other well because advocacy and review is what we can do to help those people who things have gone wrong for. So we look at merits review, we look at judicial review, we look at the commonwealth ombudsman we look at advocacy and submission writing and we look at client service in that module as well or in that subject as well. The final subject once again non-lawyers are exempt from it because it's all about getting you ready for registration and practise as a migration agent. Um but it's a very practical subject. It's very different to all the other subjects. It's an opportunity to put everything you've learned into practice. Uh and you will undertake a work integrated learning experience. Either uh an internship or I have some fumes coming in which I could do without. uh if you're not able to participate in an internship for family reasons or work reasons or other reasons, you can participate in our simulated migration advice clinic which is quite an exciting option. Uh so I have put on the slide the order of the subjects. So basically you have to complete the first three subjects before you can move on to the next block of subjects. Although you can for example do 78301 and 78302 at the same time or 78301 and 78303 at the same time. So basically those four subjects can be taken in any order. Um but you can't take them unless you've either completed the first three subjects or you can complete two when you're doing one concurrently for example. And you can't complete the final subject until you've completed all other subjects or once again you might be doing it with 78304 and 78305 or if you're in summer session what might you be doing it with? You might be doing 78302 and 78305. Um so we've had that poll so we will move on. Um, I have put a study plan here and those of you who um, do go ahead and enrol, you'll find I'll put this up on our orientation page as well so that you have an idea. Um, if you are wanting to complete the program full-time, it's a 12-month program starting in autumn. As you can see, you take the first three subjects, you take the next three subjects, and you can take 78302 and 78305 in summer. and you're finished. Now, a word of caution about summer. Summer isn't a session. Summer subjects are in intensive mode and we can't offer all our subjects in intensive mode because they just don't lend themselves to it. Um, you know, students in 78304, for example, would be tearing their hair out if they were trying to do it in intensive mode. Um, so just a word of caution, if you are starting full-time autumn 26, don't enrol in 78302 for spring. Uh, because you'll want to do it in summer so that you can finish off. Um, if you are studying part-time, uh, you have two years to finish the program. I've put some options there. There are different permutations and combinations. Um, but just again be aware that if you want to do 78302 in summer, don't do it in spring. Um, because there won't be another option for you. But you might prefer just to take a break over summer. It's it's pretty short. Um, in fact, the the break between the end of spring session and the start of the following autumn is actually shorter than a break between the end of autumn session and the start of spring session. So, it's it's not long. Um, and you know, it might be a good idea to take a break and recharge your batteries. But anyway, if if you're not able to enroll online in what you want to enroll on, you can make what's called an e- request and they'll send that through to me and I'll have a look at your reasons for wanting to do something different. It may well be something that you're completely allowed to do. Um but because only certain subjects are offered in summer, it somehow sometimes plays a little bit of havoc with um our online enrollment. Um in terms of the capstone, if you complete in summer, you'll finish um towards the end of February. Your results will be available in March and you would sit the June July capstone um which is intake two. Students who finish in autumn would normally sit intake three which is the October November intake and students who finish in spring they finish finish in December they would normally sit the February intake. Now we do have um a short course running a migration capstone assessment preparation program course. Now I guarantee you that twothirds of you won't need it. All right. Our our graduates do very very well in the capstone. About 2/3 of them get through um the first time and they don't need a capstone preparation program. But if you feel that you would benefit from more intensive preparation from the capstone and remember you get a capstone preparation module in your final module. Um, but conquering the capstone is very different to learning to be a competent migration advisor because in the capstone you have to be able to find the answers to questions very very quickly and uh at the moment in the oral component um you're not allowed to refer to pre-prepared notes. Uh so there's a lot of preparation needs to be done um for the capstone. though. Two advantages. It's not very expensive. I don't think it's an 8week program and it's under $2,000. Plus, you get a $10,000 $10,000 a 10% alumni discount. Um, but the other thing is that um the places are limited. It fills very very fast and I will give you guys a heads up when enrollments open. Okay? So, um we have dozens of people who can't get in. they fill out weeks and weeks, months before uh it even starts. Um and you guys will get a heads up. Um but you know, don't think you have to do it. It's there as an option if you want to do it. Um originally we set it up for um graduates of other programs who weren't doing as well in the capstone, but u our students didn't want to miss out. Our graduates didn't want to miss out. Um okay, so here's our teaching team. Uh, I'm starting to get a bit a bit outnumbered. We used to have nearly as many girls as boys. Um, so the three T's as we call them, Tom, Tony, and Tim are all on staff with me. Uh, and they are course coordinators. Um, Dr. Fatty Cotto is our capstone preparation expert. He is one of our own graduates, very early graduate. he got the highest mark in the capstone that had been achieved at that time when he did it and uh we were very happy he's he runs a very very successful migration practice and we were very happy to uh invite him back to teach with us. Um Shira is also one of our wonderful graduates. She is just amazing. She's just published her second book. Um so she's busy doing book tours. She's our refugee and humanitarian visa expert. students just absolutely love her. I find her very centering and calming. I love just listening to the recordings of her class. She's she's so calm and lovely and she knows everything that uh you need to know about refugee and humanitarian visas. Um also your industry mentors. So u the two guys at the top, Dr. Max H and um Sid Raj Padhari uh and Fiona O Sullivan. Uh Fiona, another one of our wonderful graduates, um one of our stars in the program who we snappled up as soon as she finished and had a couple of years experience under her belt. Um they assist you with your practical practical workshops really on how to lodge various various visa applications. Um the other photo there is Alan Freckleton. Uh he is a lawyer um of uh many years experience, also an academic of many years experience. um he assists in 78304 and again the students absolutely love him. He will extend you. He moderates the discussion forums in uh that subject. So um we also have some markers on board but as I said you've got a combination of lawyers. Um Tim's got a a foot in both camps at the moment because he's just been admitted to practice as a lawyer. Um but he's still a registered migration agent at the moment. Um, Shira is an agent. Uh, Fattie is an agent. Max, Fiona, and Sid are all agents. So, that's my wonderful support crew. Now, we do have a very flexible approach. Everything is online. We use the Canvas learning management system, and I'm going to give you a sneak peek if it works. Um what it means is that everything is on online for you and you can access it from anywhere. As long as you have a reliable internet connection, you can access it um all our live sessions are online. Um wherever possible. We hold them outside business hours. Uh with tutorials, we do run them at lunchtime and 8:00 p.m. to give uh you know, we do have some students who would like to be able to do some of their work while their kids are at school. Um and so we do try to accommodate them with um some sessions that are a little earlier, but everything's recorded except our drop in Q&A sessions and you there's no compulsion. It's not compulsory to attend live. I do encourage you to try to organize your affairs so that you can attend at least some of the workshops live throughout the program. not every single one uh in every single subject but the more practice you get um that you get through those workshops the better the better it's going to be. Uh we everything all our subjects align with the occupational competency standards for migration agents. So if you're not aware of those um they set out the knowledge, skills and professionalism that's required of an Australian migration agent and that is what the capstone assessment purports to test. So in your final subject 78305, you'll be spending a lot of time looking at those occupational competency standards and you will also be practicing to be quizzed about them in the oral component of the capstone. Okay, not fun. not something that you'll have to worry about in professional practice, but you won't be able to practice until you get over that hurdle if you're wanting to register as a migration agent. Uh so our program is very very practical. Um to be honest, if you don't like the work that we do in our program, you won't like the work of a migration advisor, okay? Um because that's pretty much what you're going to be doing. Um you will be participating in online discussions. In some subjects you'll get marks for that. Not all subjects but do it anyway because um those discussions will often come up in your assessment tasks. Hint hint. You have a lot of low stakes tasks. So quizzes, case studies. We do peer review activities so that you have a chance to have a look at how someone else approached the same task. Um you'll be writing letters of advice, you'll be writing file notes, you'll be writing memorandums. Um and you'll be writing submissions. We do group work in some subjects, not all. Um many many practical workshops whether there um you know whether that relates to building your skills, whether it relates to preparing for the oral exam or a written exam if you're when you reach a subject where there is a written exam. Um the big assessment task is your client file. So there is an oral and a written component of the client file. Uh combined they normally carry about 60% of the marks. Uh and in um four of the subjects um there are written exams which carry 30% of the marks. So the client file doesn't carry the full 60%. uh it'll carry 30% for your oral and the other 30 marks will be for your written exam. Now, I'm uh I'm of the view that written exams aren't the best way to test your knowledge and certainly wouldn't want it to be 100% of your assessment. But the feedback we get from our graduates after the capstone is, "Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for making us do written exams because once they start the capstone they meet graduates from other institutions from other approved providers who haven't done any written exams and they just haven't had that same practice at answering and resolving migration law problems under the pressure of time. So that's why you have some written exams. Um so you know in those subjects you have written exam preparation workshops you have lots of preparation activities please do them just because they don't carry any marks doesn't mean they are not uh important they're not significant all right let's see if this works there is no sound on it because I want to talk over it um but this is an exclusive preview of the build site of migration agent skills so this is very similar to the homepage that you're going to might be an updated welcome from me. Uh, and this you may be interested in is your to-do list. Really helpful to keep you up to date with what's coming coming up. Um, once you click on modules, you will see unexpanded modules. So, I've started to scroll down there. You can expand them. They won't all be open. They're released progressively. You'll see the get started module and you'll see your assessment tasks and client file activities. Preparation activities will open very soon. Um the Friday before we officially start um the module one will open the week after that and then they'll be released in accordance with the timetable. So you can see your first module is researching migration law. We move on to locating and analyzing case law. Um what else do we have? Your final um final module there is let me pause this because I'm getting ahead of myself. Your final module is advising clients as an RMA. Um so this is what the get start module get started module looks like. You have a timetable there. Um we have mentoring. Uh and that's an opportunity to sign up for mentoring. Uh and this is a quick look at module one. And I'm just picking a few pages at random so that you can see. So a canvas page will have some text on it for you to read and that'll have some sort of activity. It might be a video to watch or a test your knowledge activity or a client uh a course presentation to to work through. Um so this is a little video on using LegendCom. Some of you may already be aware of Legendcom. that is the the essential database um for the profession for the courts for the tribunals for the department uh and uh very very early on in your very first subject we're going to be getting you very familiar with legend there's lots of legend com activities to do um so you can just click next to move on to the next page and you see we've got um sources of migration or policy so once again little videos and then little activities to do. Uh what else did I pick for you? Um legal problem sol problem solving with Iraq. So Iraq is the method that lawyers use to solve legal problems and we're going to teach you how to do it very early on in your very first module. U this is a course presentation where you just walk through the different pages. Uh and hopefully by the end you you know all about IRA and how to use it. So each module has online sessions and recordings. That's where your links are, your non-accessible activities, your assessment tasks, uh, and, uh, yeah, that's it. That's what it looks like. So, um, a little sneak peek, a little sneak preview for you, uh, of our new migration agent skills. Uh, I think I might have skipped past, did I? No. Um, all right. But in terms of your workload, I don't want you to have any illusions. This is a postgraduate law degree. You have to be prepared to work hard and please be willing to take advantage of all the learning opportunities that we've made available for you. Okay? You know, you really cannot afford to just scrape through. You can't afford to get to the end of your program and maybe only know 60% of what you need to know because you won't get through the capstone. But even if you did somehow fluke the capstone, what happens when you get into professional practice and and people's lives um not not physical um but you know where they're going to spend their lives, what they're going to do with their lives is dependent on you and you can destroy that by getting it wrong. So we say that you need to be willing and able to devote a minimum of 12 hours each week to each subject in autumn and spring sessions and summer session is intensive. So that's 20 hours. Okay. Now I say minimum of 12 hours. The the uni is pretty strict. You know it's not supposed to be more than 150 hours all up for the course. But I do encourage you to do legendcom practice for half an hour a day at the beginning until you get really familiar with using it because you will not get through the capstone unless you are fast at using legend and it's going to set you in really good set you up for all your assessment tasks. You know, you'll be set up um for the whole program if you master using Legend really early. So, take the time. Um, and I I feel I'm harping on this a little bit, but please, if you're going to enroll in the program, commit to completing all the activities, whether they're accessible or not. So, I've given you here an example. This is called get ready for your client file. So, what we do is we try to give you a practice. Anything you're going to be assessed on, we try to give you a practice run, at least one practice run. In some subjects, we had get ready and get set. you know, you have more. Um, but this in these get ready or in this get ready activity, there are various components that simulate what you're going to have to do in your accessessible client file that carries 60% of the marks. And this is a completely safe environment to have a practice, have a crack, um, and make sure you understand what is expected of you for your client file. So we start in our very first subject where I said that your oral assessment is a client consultation. Um you create a client consultation checklist. You have a crack yourself at it using the resources that I've made available for you. Then come along to a workshop with me and we'll talk it through and we'll talk about all the different elements, what we need to include and why we do include certain things, why we don't include other things. um and uh you know what elements what we're going to cover in some of those elements. You then have an opportunity to practice with a peer. You'll do that throughout this program. We ask you to sign up um put your name down, sign up with another student and make arrangements. You'll be given the um you know the scenarios that you need, the instructions you need, whether you're playing the the client, whether you're playing the adviser, whether you're playing the supervisor, whatever sort of matter it is. And we encourage you to practice. If you can't practice with a peer, practice with a family member, practice with a friend, practice in front of the mirror. As much practice as you can do, um you are going to reap the rewards of that when it comes to capstone time and professional practice. Uh once you've had a chance to practice with a peer, you can watch a demonstration client consultation that we have recorded for you and then you'll be writing a bearand to your supervisor about the client's case. You've taken instructions from them. You found out what their case is all about. Um now you're going to tell your supervisor, okay, these are what the issues are. I've done the research. This is what else I need to know. this is the advice that I might be giving this client. Um, you know, this is the conclusion that I've reached. Um, and then there'll be an online workshop where you'll be have the opportunity to review not only your memo but everyone else's memo. Uh, and uh, make sure as I said that you are completely on the right track before you start your client file that carries 60 marks. Okay. So, so commit to it. uh you know we have put and I in particular have put a lot of work into developing all these prep preparatory activities for you and it is so disappointing when students think well I don't have to worry about that cuz they don't carry any marks why should I bother um I promise you they will pay off all right little more about the integrated components I don't think I've spoken about the mentoring program so in our very first subject migration agent skills, you can opt into our mentoring program. And our mentors are current 78305 students and they will hold a session with you on a Monday or a Tuesday night. There'll be maybe three or four of you in your mentoring group and they will cover various topics. Now, they don't cover course content. They'll be covering things like how to use legend, how to navigate your way around canvas, how to site, you know, legal citation, um how to use oley to find cases, how to make the best advantage of feedback, you know, things like that. Um but the one of the best things I think and one of the reasons why our mentoring program is so successful is that you are having an opportunity to build a network and communicate and contact with students who are in exactly the same position as you just you know 12 18 months earlier and you will realize that if they can do it and make it to their 78305 their final subject you can do that too. So, it's a wonderful opportunity if you um can spare the time on a Monday or Tuesday evening. We do encourage you to get involved. Um our research on our statistics has shown that students who participate in the mentoring program are much more likely to complete the program and they're much more likely to pass their first subject. So, a few little carrots there. We also offer tutoring in our first three subjects. I've already mentioned the practical online workshops in all subjects. Uh and the bottom two components our capstone assessment preparation um you know as I said there's activities throughout all the subjects. Uh but the there's a specific module and um Dr. Kotob who runs our MCAP, our short pro short course uh comes along to do the workshops there on how to prepare for the oral component, how to prepare for the written and uh you know I get intel um because we are an approved provider and only the approved providers get feedback from Legal Training Australia. Um but Fattie gets feedback from his MCAP learners who've finished the program and gone on past the capstone. So uh he'll share all those tips and all that intel with you in 78305 in module 4. And as I've said, you do not don't feel compelled in any way to enroll in MCAP, but that option is there for you. And uh you'll have an opportunity to to get a place, secure a place, whereas uh graduates from other universities are unfortunately missing out because uh our students are beating them um and they're leaving it a little bit too late to enroll. Uh but we didn't expect it to enroll to fill up months before it started. um work integrated learning really important component of 78305 probably one of the most popular things in the course uh you can do a paid or unpaid internship uh it's 70 hours over over um I was going to say 10e period but that's not right over a 4-we period um you can split those hours uh as in terms of what's convenient for your host organization if you're currently working for a firm, a migration advice firm or firm of lawyers. Um, that's okay. It's fine. You can do your internship with your employer. Uh, but you can't do your normal job. Um, you've got to do things that you wouldn't normally be doing, which might be, you know, going and watching a tribunal hearing or doing an audit um to make sure the migration advisers, migration agents in your firm are complying with the code of conduct, things like that. Um, but that's an option. um you can do it with your employer. Um and uh as I said earlier, if you're not able to take an internship, and we understand that not everyone can, people have other commitments, um you can opt out of the internship and you'll be given permission to participate in the simulated migration advice clinic where you will actually um be preparing to interview a a it's a simulated client. It's not a real client, but it's pretty scary, I suppose, still. Um and uh a lot of our clients are our graduates um who come back. Our graduates are absolutely wonderful in in terms of what they contribute to our program. Um something else that you'll learn about in in 78305 is um our graduates run a mentoring program uh for our graduates and for our newly registered migration agents. So our our alumni are I would say the best alumni definitely. Um and they come back and they play the client for you in the simulated migration advice clinic and then they'll give you some feedback at the end of the consultation from the client's point of view to say how they think you went and then you do your file note of the consultation. You write that up and then you write a letter of advice to your client. you send that and one of our wonderful alumni will then give you some feedback on that letter from the client's perspective. Um, you're probably happy to know none of those tasks are accessible. Um, we actually you write journals in 78305 because uh one of our other focuses is on building um becoming reflective practitioners. uh we focus very much on lifetime learning. To be a successful migration advisor, you have to be committed to continually updating your learning and knowledge and skills because migration law changes frequently. Uh it it's it's not an easy area to be working in. Um but what it means is it's fascinating. Um it's always exciting. there's always something happening and there's lots of different areas that you can choose. Uh I did say that I had a slide on our communicating with clients project. I have to give a plug to this because it has been so successful. So from our point of view, it won the very first uh law faculty award for teaching excellence. Um but it also won a vice chancellor's teaching and learning citation. So that's across all of UTS, not just the law faculty. So, we're pretty happy about that. But I'm pretty sure what you'll be more impressed about is the increase in our graduates pass rate. So, you've probably heard the horror stories about the uh the capstone in the early days when no more than 20% of candidates passed. Well, the very first candidates who sat the oral, only 11% passed. Um, now with Legal Training Australia, the figures are getting up a bit higher. they're getting up to 40 or 50% but our graduates are up around 80 90% and we hit a high of 95% last year. So how good is that? So once again these are nonaccessible activities but please get involved with the communicating with clients project. Do the workshop activities, do the preparation activities for the workshop. do your practice with your peers and you'll be one of those students who can be confident when it comes to sitting the oral component of the capstone that you're not going to have to reset it. You're going to nail it. You're going to get more than 65% um you are going to do well. So that's our communicating with clients project. Uh we do have an annual onampus meet and greet. So all our all our classes are online. Uh um at UTS content is pre-recorded. So you'll have little videos to watch, you'll have things to read, but our live sessions, we have a live class, we have live tutorials, we have live workshops. Um they're all recorded for you. Um but once a year we have an annual onampus meet and greet where you can come and meet your teachers, you can meet each other. Um second Saturday in September and once you become alumni, we have an annual alumni reunion as well. There's a lot of support here at UTS to help you thrive. We have the wonderful Maria Albertos, our director of students. Um, who now, you know, I'm your first port of call if you're having issues or your subject coordinators, but if Maria will assist you if you need a referral to counseling, if you're if the wheels have fallen off and you, you know, you're really struggling to get through your program and you don't know uh if you're going to make it in the two years, for example. So she's there and and she will meet with you every week in person if you want if you need that. Um so she's a wonderful resource. The other absolute wonderful support at UTS that I was so impressed with when I first came to UTS and found out about it is UTS helps. Please commit when you start to taking advantage of everything you possibly can with them. um they offer language support. So if English is an additional language for you, Cleveru, um you know, take advantage of their language support, but they also offer academic skills support. So if you haven't studied for a long time, go along to some of their workshops. They're all online. You can jump on, see what's available. um helps will also attend um one of our very early workshops where we're looking at English expression and in our intermediate subjects in seminate 303 um they do some bespoke workshops for our intermediate students just for our just for migration law students. So they are a wonderful resource don't forget about them. careers is there not only to help you um you know build your resume and all sorts of things in terms of uh expanding your skills to be to become more employable but they manage a lot of our they manage our opting out for mentoring they manage our internship program um and UTS student services accessibility if you have a disability if you are a carer register with accessibility early. If you have cognitive issues and you need a little bit longer to do a timed quiz, they will make arrangements with your subject coordinator for you to get an extra 5 minutes or 10 minutes. When you have a written exam, they'll arrange for a break for you. But you've got to make an appointment. You've got to get in. So, uh you know, if you decide to enroll, um get get on to accessibility earlier uh as early as you can. Counseling and health services. All right. See information. I haven't had a look at what's going on in the Q&A at the moment, but probably um you've already had a look at this or u one of our lovely girls uh has given you an indication. What I want to tell you though because you won't know this and I have to say I was absolutely amazed. our wonderful faculty general manager was so supportive of us moving to this eight subject program um that she went back for us and she she um negotiated and arranged for a lower subject fee per subject so that you will not be paying any more for an eight subject graduate diploma than you would have been paying if we were running the six subjects in 2026. So that to me is pretty amazing. She wanted to make sure that we weren't shooting ourselves in the foot by becoming any more expensive. Uh and uh she really she really did us proud as far as that went. Something else I popped on that slide um because a lot of our graduates are interested. They start this program and they find that they actually are pretty good at this law stuff. Um you can transition into the UTS jurist doctor program which is a post-graduate law degree. um and you get 30 credit points. So there are six electives in the jurist doctor. Um five of those electives can be your migration law of your migration law subjects. Uh and a 10% alumni discount. And if you're one of our superstars, you can even get a Commonwealth supported place in the jurist doctor program, which we didn't even know until that happened to the first of our students who um transferred across. So that's an option, too. All right, these are the dates for applying for autumn. So, domestic students have till the 25th of January. Please don't leave it too late. Um, something I'd like to take the opportunity to point out here is that you will be given a date um sometime in February that you can accept your offer by if you've given an offer. Um no start when we start the subject sites will be available um a week before the course officially commences which I think is the 16th of February I think we start next year um you cannot afford to be 3 weeks late starting. So apply early, accept your enrollment early, enroll early and be ready to start, right? Because that get started module will be ready for you. And we also have um an MLP home site with lots of information on it um that you will find very useful.

PLT Hello, my name is Maxine Evers and welcome to this evening's practical legal training session. I am the Director of Professional Programmes here in the Law Faculty at UTS and part of our professional programs is our practical legal training that you are here tonight to hear more about. So before we go through the information around our practical legal training and particularly the changes for 2026, I would like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora nation upon whose lands our university stands. And we are privileged to be on the land of historians, of storytellers, of nations that have taken education as such an important part of their culture and their history. I particularly thank you for joining us because for many of you, you will probably still be getting over spring. I know my colleagues that are marking here in the law faculty have finished their marking and our grades have gone in. So your results will come out shortly. And I know some of you are studying over summer. So it's a busy time of year and we do appreciate you taking the time to tune in tonight. I hope that it will be worthwhile for you because there are some changes to the PLT programme that I think are changes that are obviously important for you to know and for you to be able to see how the learning will be delivered, how we've designed the learning and how it will be delivered here in the UTS Law faculty. Please pop your questions in the Q&A and my colleague Sam, who is with me tonight, will answer those that she can. We can leave some to the end. And as Sam knows, and I'll say this at the outset, I'll also say at the end for any students that are unsure about how, where, when, why PLT fits into their study plan, you can email me and I can meet with you individually and we can go through your study plan together. Just going to give you a little bit of background as to PLT programme, particularly the reason for the changes that are coming in for next year. So many of you will know, particularly as you are so close to the end of your law study, that the law degree and the legal profession are regulated in New South Wales by the Legal Profession Admission Board, the LPAB. So both the academic degrees you've done, an undergraduate Bachelor of Laws or a postgraduate Juris Dr, are regulated by the LPAB. As you all know, you've heard of the Priestly 11, PLT is exactly the same and PL TS version of the Priest 11 is the competencies. So our programme must teach to the competencies. You may also be aware that there's been a lot of discussion about PLT this year, its purpose, its relevance, its costs and its quality. And those discussions commenced in at the opening of law term at the beginning of the year by the Chief Justice who raised concerns about the course. Since then there has been a lot of discussion, a lot of consultation and this slide that I've just put up here talks about the survey that the NSW Legal Professional Admission Board commissioned the Law Society to undertake. The survey asked both employers of recent graduates as well as graduates who had completed PLT about their experiences. And we were very pleased to learn that out of the NSW providers, we had the second highest score for students having the most positive experience. The law school where students were had the most positive experience that were above UTS is Newcastle Law School, which runs an embedded programme in their law in their undergraduate law degree at Newcastle. So there's the timeline we're now up to the consultation. Has closed. There was a discussion at the Supreme Court early last month and they're we're now waiting on the delivery of outcomes. In the meantime, as a result of discussions and consultations and our Dean here in the Law faculty and myself met with the chair of the LPAB on several occasions to discuss our programme. As a result of that consultation discussions, the LPAB have buried the accreditation of all NSW providers of PLT. So each year or each every couple of years depending on changes to programmes, the LPAB accredits or RE accredits our programmes. So all NSW providers of PLT, not just UTS, have had their accreditation varied and I'll talk about those changes in short time, but the variation is to commence from 2026. So there's some of the students here that are attending tonight, whether you may be in your early years of your law study or for law students outside of UTS, this slide shows you where you can do your practical legal training in our degrees. So for those students that are undertaking the standalone Bachelor of Laws, your PLT is included in your degree. It's undertaken in the final session of your Bachelor's for students that are undertaking a combined undergraduate degree or the Juris Dr. Your PLT programme is the Graduate Certificate in Professional Legal Practise and for JD students you have the option of doing the combined programme, the Juris Dr, Graduate Certificate in Professional Legal Programme, or doing the standalone Juris Dr and then the Graduate Certificate. And the main difference with doing the standalone JD or the JD combined with PLT is that it's a little bit shorter because we make use of our summers in the combined programme. So this slide shows you very simply the major changes or the the core changes to the PLT programme. The first change is a requirement that PLT must be delivered on campus face to face, not online, not synchronous online, but on campus, in person, face to face for 15 days. The second component of the changes to the PLT programme is that practical experience is now 15 days. So 15 seems to be a popular number, 15 days on campus and 15 days practical experience. As we're designing and we many of you will know that we already offer an on campus hybrid PLT programme. We also offer at the moment an online PLT programme. The PLT programme here at UTS was established in 1996, and even in those early years of the PLT programme, way before COVID, we had an external stream. So we've always offered on campus and off campus. But from 2026, to comply with the variation to accreditation, we will be on campus. So as we're designing the programme for next year, we're looking at the advantages of coming onto campus, and some of those are listed on the slide here. As you would know, we hear a lot about soft skills. Now. Soft skills are going to distinguish us from AI. Lawyers working in teams, collaboration, communication are the skills that we know employers want in their graduates. I was at a large law firm last week for a meeting and the feedback that I received about UTS graduates was exactly that, that they know as we use the expression how to hit the ground. They know to hit the ground running. They know how to work in a team, they know how to communicate. So PLT is the capstone of the graduate attributes and the course intended learning outcomes that you have done in either your bachelor's degree or your Juris Dr degree. So here on campus, you get immediate feedback from your clinical practitioners, from your peers. You get the opportunity to practise, to practise again, to get more feedback. You're starting to build that community of the profession, stepping into the profession, and many of you know will have used the fantastic facilities that we have here at UTS, particularly on level 14 and including our postgraduate lounge, which as APLT student, you'll have access to. So this is really PLT and particularly on campus to immerse yourself in the learning is to give you the best preparation to transition to the legal profession. It really is that stepping off or that stepping stone to go from being a law student to being a legal professional and that instant spontaneous collaboration that you get on campus is really going to give you that edge as you move into the profession, Including having those conversations with the range of clinical practitioners who I'll introduce to you later that are engaged in the programme. So this is what it looks like from Autumn session next year. So it's a blended programme now and what blended means is 15 days on campus on Canvas, your materials, your resources, the discussion board, etcetera. So you as you for UTS students that use Canvas, for non UTS students, your learning management system, there'll be work there, there'll be engagement there, there'll be preparation there and then you'll bring it all together when you come onto campus. We've made the decision to allocate the on campus days as Fridays and Saturdays, so we've got 15 days. We spent a lot of time thinking about what would be best for the majority of students. Whether we would run intensive 3 weeks together, 15 days, weekdays back to back. Whether we would offer three weeks across the session, the beginning, in the middle and the end. Or whether we would offer a continuous programme that looked at Fridays and Saturdays for a couple of reasons. Those reasons are we know many of your working and working full time and it would be difficult to be able to take 15 weekdays away from your employment. We hoped that having Fridays means it's restricting the number of time you've got to take off work. We do acknowledge that students have commitments on a weekend, but we felt that the Saturday was a good match with the Friday. And some of you may, or have you done some intensive electives here at UTS? And that's a model that we use for our intensive electives Friday, Saturday and sometimes Sunday also spreading across the session. And I'll show you a timetable in a couple of slides, Gives you the opportunity to practise, to learn firstly, then to practise and then to reflect on what you've done so that your your learning is deeper and the opportunities to build your capacity and your confidence are increased. What we've also done with the 15 days on campus is to include your skills assessments. So currently students, whether they're online or on campus, come onto campus for a couple of skills assessments. Those assessments are advocacy, interviewing and negotiation. We have now bundled those assessments as part of your 15 days and you'll see what that looks like again when I show you the timetable. So that's the learning, your core subjects. Complementing that learning is the 15 days practical experience. Now many of you will know and will have read on our web pages that the current model and certainly what we've had for many, many years has been 65 days. And this year we introduced a 20 day option. The 20 day and the 65 days practical experience will no longer be able to be enrolled in from autumn. If you are currently enrolled in either the 65 day or the 20 day, that's absolutely fine. You stay enrolled in those days unless you want to transfer out and we can talk about that a bit later. The subjects themselves, 65 days practical experience and 20 days practical experience will still be available, but they won't be open to new enrollments. Everyone will enrol in the practical experience, 15 days, that practical experience can take place during your coursework. So if you're studying in autumn, can take place during the autumn session or within 12 months of enrolling in the subject. So if you can't get your 15 days done while you're studying your subjects, you can do it once the semester is over and you have those subjects completed. So this is a view of what the timetable looks like. So you can see we've got 3 subjects and I'll talk about those in a little bit more detail. Skills and wills, litigation practise and property and commercial practise. So they're the days and the weeks that we've allocated to those subjects. And you've got a little bit of a sneak preview of the type of topics or content that you will cover. So we're not having class every week. There will be breaks between the weeks to total the 15 days on campus and then they'll be towards the end. There'll be choices of whether you come in on a Friday or a Saturday. So you'll be given the opportunity to book in, for example, here on the 15th and 16th of May's when you do your interview assessments. So you'll have a choice of either coming on the Friday or the Saturday. There'll be a roster system that you will need to complete. So that's a snapshot of the timetable when you enrol in the subjects. You will see this through your enrolment. This is just another way of showing it. And you can see here that Skills and Wills has been a bit greedy. It's not 5 days each across the three subjects, a total 15 because Skills is such a fundamental subject about Skills, which is really at the heart of PLT. We've allocated 6 days to Skills and Wills. So you do a lot of work around the skills of being a lawyer and then you move into the, it's called an elective, but every student will undertake it, his will. So drafting wills a state administration. So six days there because there is a lot to get through. But those six days, as you can see from the slide, also include your assessment. Litigation practise has five days. So in litigation, I'll talk a little bit more about this. You have the opportunity to do 2 electives out of four electives. So you've got a little bit more time in that five days in litigation practice. Then our final core subject or coursework subject in PLT is property and commercial practice, and that's been allocated 4 days. It doesn't. So litigation practise has two electives, property and commercial has one elective. So it's a little bit shorter in time, but you will get through all the content. So a little bit about why PLT at UTS. For those of you that are starting with us here in the law faculty, you'll be very aware that we have a very practise based professional learning and teaching approach. We continue that into PLT. We get very positive feedback from the profession about the skills, the capability, capabilities and the values that our graduates have. And that's just a couple of quotes on this slide that have come from employers that take our students, both as PLT students during practical experience and as graduates. And we've got the 2 ends of the spectrum here. You've got Nicholas Stewart, who's in private practise, and you've got Shawn Stimpson, who is in in community law practise at Redfern Legal Centre. So you can see they talk about the skills that UTS PLT students have, but also the capabilities such as being curious, being able to engage meaningfully, to be able to engage with clients. So these are your 3 subjects and you saw those on the timetable, skills and wills, property and commercial practise and litigation practise. So when we talk about electives in those subjects, in two of those subjects, litigation practise and property and commercial practise, they are electives within those subjects. They're not electives as they are in your degree where you enrol in them separately. You opt to choose the elective once you start the subjects and I'll talk a little bit more about those. So how you enrol, let's say for example in the subject litigation practise, you have a choice of family or criminal law. In the first week of session, your subject coordinator will put up a list on Canvas and you enrol yourself or you opt in for either family or criminal law. And I say to students, I encourage students to opt in early because we need to have equal numbers. So once we get to half of the class enrolled in one of the electives, by default, all students that haven't already opted will have to go into the other electives. So particularly if you've done electives in your degree or you really enjoy criminal law as a core subject, you want to go into particular areas of practise. I would encourage you to make that decision before you start in Week 1. Enrol as you can, as soon as you can. So Skills and Wills has an elective called Wills an Estate. Traditionally wills in the state has been treated as a compulsory component and we've continued to do that. We get very good feedback from students about the skills of drafting and problem solving that they do in wills and estate. Some of you will have started succession with Des Finegan. Des teaches the wills and estates part of skills and wills in property and commercial practice. So that's the subject that you come onto campus for four days for. You have a choice of either banking and finance or planning, an environmental law practice and then in litigation practice you'll have two electives. So you can do, as I've said, early criminal or family and you do either consumer or employment law. So a great deal of choice there. Let me introduce you to my colleagues in the PLT programme. Courtney, Anne and Jackie are currently the subject coordinators for each of those subjects. There's a little bit of a description about their experience below their photos and you can see that they are highly experienced in general practice and in specialist areas in some cases. So you are being taught by practitioners that have a great deal of experience in the profession in smaller firms. So Anne for example, is a sole practitioner to larger firms where Courtney is working where Jackie has worked in specialist legal firms such as Jackie working in a family law specialist firm. So you're getting a real depth and breadth of knowledge in the electives. And as I said, we've introduced some new electives this year. You've got Employment and Industrial Relations, which is taught by Catherine Tirado. Catherine is an alumna of our law school and she's senior legal counsel with FedEx. You're taught by, if you do, Consumer law, Jessica Norgard. Jessica works for one of the regulators and has a lot of experience in that area. And then Jie Hu has just joined our PLT team is on parental leave at the moment. Some of you may have had Jie teaching you in criminal law. Jie will be taking the criminal law component and Jackie the family law component in property and commercial. You have Ben Salon who's also an alumni, an alumni, sorry, of this university and then has a specialisation in private practice in planning and environment and environmental practice. And then Maria MacKenzie is an alumna and she is senior legal officer with Westpac and she teaches the banking and finance. And then I've introduced Des who teaches the wills in skills and wills. So again, experience, current experience, current practice, being able to work with you to impart to you the type of legal issues and related issues that the profession and the law is facing, including in technology. Just set out here a timeline just to give you a sense of what it looks like when you start your PLT. So you may be completing your academic degree, whether that be a bachelor's or a JD. You do your PLT either as a graduate certificate in professional legal practise or within your Bachelor of Laws or as the combined JDPLT. Once you get your results from PLT including your practical experience. So your practical experience once you enrol in that subject is managed by the career hub here at the university. Once you complete that, you submit some forms to set out the days and the the hours that you've done to reach that 15 days. You're asked to submit a very short reflective journal about your experience. You're then in a position to be signed off for your PLT. You'll get your formal results and that's it. Formal results that the LPAB require for you to apply for admission. I'd encourage you when you have the time to look at the LPA BS website if you haven't already. It's a lot of detail about the requirements for applying for admission, so please read the guide for admission because it sets out what you need to do and also gives you a sense of how long these things will take and the type of documents that the board requires. You can also start to think about the date that you wish to be admitted on and the 2026 admission dates. I'm not sure if they're up yet. The last time I looked it was only the 2025, but they will shortly put up next year's admission dates where you attended the Supreme Court. Your admission is moved and that is when you become a legal practitioner. OK, so that's what you do in terms of then getting for your practical experience, completion of that. If you're finished all your core subjects and you're only got your practical experience outstanding. Once you fulfil the requirements through career Hub, you're then in a position to apply for admission. Some of you will be working in in the legal world and you'll be able to claim your 15 days as part of your usual work. Others of you will be working in other industries and will need to find 15 days placement within a legal environment. I encourage you if you're in that situation to look at the UTS career site. The career site will advertise law jobs. Doesn't have to be called APLT or APA job. It's a job in a law firm. Employers in law firms, in community legal centres, in corporations, in government departments. Know what practical experience is and they'll be able to indicate to you whether you can do your practical experience with them. But we do have some connections here at UTS. We can't guarantee that we can find you a placement, but we can connect you up. So we have anti Slavery. Some of you might have done some volunteer work with anti-slavery. We've got the Students Legal Service in Building 2. We have an arrangement with the City of Sydney Law Society, which sits within the NSW Law Society, so it's the CBD Law Society. They will, if they've got vacancies, place students. And then if you are an international student and you need some assistance with securing some practical experience, we have connections with two international firms. But as I said, I encourage you to look at UTS careers and also to use their service if you feel you need a little bit of support and assistance with preparing an application for a job, your CV, your covering letter, interview practise, etcetera. Now many of you will have heard about the Early Start Rule. Now that's a rule of the Legal Profession Admission Board. It's not a UTS rule. Rule's been in for quite a few years now and the rule is if you are at the towards the end of your academic law degree and you have no more than two electives remaining. So all the core have been completed and you've got one or two electives outstanding. And you think, well I'd really like to start my PLT. I'd like to do a full-time load. I've got 2 electives worth 6 credit points, 12 credit points. I'd like to take on at least another one subject, possibly 2 so I can spread the PLT out. Get a start. You can apply to the board for approval to do early start. So it needs to go through the LPAB. As I said, it's not a UTS rule, so there are some details there and there is some good details on the PLT current students page that I would encourage you to have a good look at that as well. Now the two electives for those students that are doing a combined degree are total electives. So if you've got 2 electives in law and two electives in business, you can't apply for the early start rule. If you've only got 2 electives in business you can start or you've got 1 elective in business and one elective in law, you can start, but it's a total of 2 electives regardless of whether they're law or non law electives. I've already spoken about the advantages of our care care service and I really do encourage you to make use of that service, particularly while you're here with us. The service does continue for a period of time after you graduate, but now is a really good time to to access their services. So let's talk about fees. On this slide you will see the fees for students that are doing their PLT within the Bachelor of Laws. Ignore this slide. Your fees are part of your bachelor's degree, your Bachelor of Laws. That's an LLB standalone, not a combined degree. Your PLT subjects are just like your electives, so you pay the same as part of your degree as you would for your electives. If you are doing the JD combined graduate certificate or AJD standalone or a combined undergraduate degree, then you'll be doing the graduate certificate and that's the information that is there on this slide. A graduate certificate to be accredited by the Tex up the tertiary education quality. Our tertiary education standards and Quality authority that regulates higher education courses dictates that a graduate certificate is akin to, if it's full time, 1 semester or 24 credit points. With our Graduate certificate in Professional Legal Practise, we give you 6 credit points of advanced standing or recognition of prior learning. So you only need to do 3 subjects. I've talked about those 3 subjects. There's six credit points each that show 18 credit points. Practical experience is a subject, it's compulsory but it's no credit points and it's no fees. The requirement is to do work in a law environment. You don't pay any fees for that and you don't get any credit points for it. So your 3 subjects I've described, skills and morals practise, property and commercial practice and litigation practice are your 18 credit points. And you pay for 18 credit points, not 24 credit points. So unfortunately it's not as clear as I'd like it to be on the fees website. There is a footnote on the fees website that tells you that you receive 6 credit points of advance standing. So when you're calculating your fees, you work it on the basis of 18 credit points. So the full fee for next year is $9810 if you are an alumni. So you've done your combined bachelor's course or you've done your Juris Dr and your graduate certificate is your second degree or maybe your third degree. With us, you are eligible for the 10% alumni savings. So with the 10% alumni savings, the total fees for your PLT, for your graduate certificate, $8829. And then you've got student amenities fees in addition to that that all students pay. Our fees are very competitive. If particularly if you are a an alumni at this university, I would encourage you to looking around at PLT to keeping up keep in mind out the fees that are are charged for this course here at UTS. So if you're thinking of studying, completing or starting your PLT, whether you can complete in one session or in two sessions. Applications for the Graduate Certificating Professional Legal Practise are open until the 25th of January for local students and for international students the 15th of January. If you are doing your Bachelor of Laws, you don't need to enrol in anything but the subjects themselves. So forget about graduate certificate when you enrolments are open. Now you can enrol in those subjects that I've identified for you tonight. Enrolments are open. So that's the final slide. I think we've got some time, Sam, for some questions. I'm just having a look. I'll stop sharing now. I may need to come back, but let me stop sharing. OK, we've got 2 questions in the Q&A. OK, so a question in the Juris Dr graduate Certificate of Legal Practice. So the combined JD, the Subject 75411 practical experience is equivalent to the 15 days mentioned. It's equivalent in that it's practical experience, but it's not the subject that you'll be moving into. If you are enrolled currently in APLT programme which includes 75411 practical experience 65 days or 75426 practical experience 20 days, you can continue in those subjects. If you wish to transfer into the new subject 15 days which is 75427, you can do that and you should have received a letter from the universities giving you that option. So you might be enrolled in the 65 days 75411. You might be finding it challenging because of work commitments elsewhere to secure 65 days. You can enrol in the new subject in autumn and new practical experience 15 days. You then will usually, as you know, if you don't complete a subject to get a fail, but we have an arrangement, the university that you won't get a fail on your transcript, they will remove. The university will remove 75411 and replace it with 75427. So if you haven't received that email and you're in that situation, please email me and I'll look into that for you. So you've got that choice if you're at the moment in either the 20 days or the 65 days. The only thing that I would say is if you're close to finishing your 65 days or your 20 days and you can complete, I would suggest you stay on the basis that if you do enrolling the 15 day practical experience subject, you wouldn't get your results till the end of autumn and you might be OK with that. That might not impact on your decisions around your career, but you might get the 15 days done in March, but you can't get your test AIMA until the results are released in early July. But if that suits your circumstances, you're very welcome to enrol in a new subject without penalty. Second question, do the marks of the PLT assessment affect your WAM? It's a really good question. If you are in the Bachelor of Laws stand alone programme, your PLT subjects are treated just like your electives and they all contribute to your WAM and your GPA. OK, if you are in the stand alone Graduate Certificate of Professional Legal Practice then you have a WAM and it's only for the graduate certificate. If you are in the combined JD graduate certificate, professional legal practise you will get a WAM that takes into consideration both courses JD and graduate certificate. I might just add something to that question. That may not be the reason for the question, but we have heard over the years that the UTS PLT programme has a reputation for being difficult. Can I say this here to you all? Now that is a myth. That is not the case, particularly for those of you that have studied with us here in the law faculty at UTS. You know what our subjects are like. You know what our assessments are like. You're undertaking assessments. Practical legal training is the capstone of your study. It is practical, it is professional. It's about the work that lawyers do, it's about the task that they undertake, whether that be advising clients, drafting documents, appearing in court, interviewing clients, problem solving, collaborating, etcetera. So they are different assessments from what you're doing in your electives. Not a lot of research is required. What you'll be asked to do is to get to interrogate the websites you need to look at, whether that be a government department website, whether it be a website of a regulator, depending on what kind of work you're doing, et cetera. That's the type of research you're doing. You might be looking at reports, again depending on the area of the subject that you're doing, but it's not the same type of research that you have done in your academic degree. You certainly need those research skills in your academic degree, particularly if you go to the bar and you're being briefed to give advice. You don't need to know how to research complex legal problems, but the Practical Legal training programme is much more practise based. The design of the programme is to get you ready to be an entry level lawyer. Similarly, the PLT programme does not have exams. So it is all about the type of tasks as I said that you do. So that looks like practise files, letters of advice, applications in the courtroom, interviews, participating in a in a negotiation. They are the type of assessments that you'll be doing. So I wouldn't worry about it having a negative impact on your WAM at all. Following question, can prior paralegal law clerk work count towards the placement requirement if we had three subjects remaining in our Bachelor of Laws? I have 59 days of unpaid work done and I'm loathe to see it going entirely to waste. Can I suggest to the students ask that question that you contact me and I'll be able to go through that with you because I'm not exactly sure whether you're doing the 15, the 15 days and whether you've done your PLT subjects. What I can say which may answer your question is the 15 day requirement. The new requirement 15 day public experience must be done concurrently with the coursework subjects or following the coursework subjects that. Is an LPAB rule that is embedded in the competencies. I mentioned the competencies earlier. They like the priest 11th of PLT that at least 15 days has to be done concurrently or following. You may, you may have known from friends or depending which course you're enrolled in might be enrolled in the 65 days and with the 65 day rule, you could do 45 days prior to commencing your PLT. That's not possible with the 15 days. It's a short time. The competencies want you to do it while you're learning your PLT subjects. But if you'd like further information, please email email me. Does a 10% alumni advantage also apply to the Graduate Certificate of Legal Practice portion of the JD? No it doesn't because it's a combined degree. Unless of course before you've done your JD PLP with us, you did a bachelor business or another course at at UTS It then the 10% alumni would apply to your whole course. It doesn't apply because it's a combined degree to the JDPLP. The advantage of the combined JD PLP is you finish earlier. So if you go to the handbook and you look up both standalone JD and the combined JD PLP, you'll see that the combined degree finishes earlier than if you do them as separate courses. The reason for that is this is in the admission rules. If you'd like to check the legal professional admission rules that says an academic law degree must be three years or equivalent to three years. And the board has always been very strict with that requirement. So in past some law schools have attempted to do a two-year postgraduate law degree etcetera and they have come foul of the LPAB. We have our course accredited because we use summers so that when we we rely on the part of the ignition rule that says three years or equivalent. So we say using summers that is the equivalent of three years. So that is the advantage of thinking about whether to do a JD or a combined JD PLP is it you'll finish early with the combined degree, but to miss out on the 10% alumni savings. So thank you for that question. Yes, very good question. If you're completing your PLT as part of your Bachelor of Laws, would the fees be deferred to Hecs? Yes, they're treated exactly the same as electives. So in your Bachelor of Laws, a stand alone law degree, you can either it's a three year law degree and the final year as you would know if it's studying that programme is law and non law electives and PLT or law and or non law electives and more law or non law electives. So the quickest way to complete a law degree at an undergraduate level is your Bachelor of Laws because the PLTS in the Bachelor of laws and charge the same as all your other subjects in the Bachelor of Laws. A good question. What's the difference between doing PLT part time and full time? Does that mean if you do part time you one subject 1 semester and two? Yeah that's a great question as well. Whichever way you like, and some students do do it over 2 sessions, particularly if they are finishing off with the early start rule. They're electives. If you only do 1 PLT subject to start with, you do skills and wills practice. OK. You can also enrol in practical experience 15 days at the same time, but if there's an introductory subject, it's skills and wills practice. You can do that on its own and then do property and commercial practice and litigation practice in the following session. Or you can do skills and wills practice and either property and commercial practice or litigation practice. It doesn't matter which one you do with Skills and Wills. OK thank you. So could you please clarify if doing a practical experience is mandatory for completion of PLT and if you're unsuccessful finding a placement, then would it affect your ability? OK, Practical experience is a requirement. PE, as it's referred to is a requirement mandatory as part of practical legal training that is prescribed in the competencies and regulated by the legal profession Admission board. As I said, we're going through changes at the moment and I think as a, as a bit of a balance to the on campus requirement now the board has accepted that 15 days will suffice. The board also and the Chief Justice you would have, if you follow this would have heard, would have read, has concerns about the quality of practical experience. It's a very mixed bag of experiences. Some students have a very rich and rewarding experience. They're mentored, they're supervised well. Other students have a poor experience. They're working in a private firm, but they're not paid, they're not supervised, they're not doing work that really helps the development as a lawyer. So there's a concern by the judiciary about practical experience, and I think that's one of the reasons why they've reduced it to 15 days. But it is 15 days. If you look at the PLT competencies, just Google PLT competencies, you'll see that the 15 days is there. As I mentioned earlier in this presentation, UTS Career Service will assist students in securing practical experience placements. There are two places on campus here at UTS, Anti Slavery in Building 2 and the Students Legal Service in Building 2 that take PLT students. They will advertise both Anti Slavery and Students Legal Service on the Career hub as well as other firms, government departments, corporations, community legal centres will also advertise. So have a have a look there first of all and see what are the opportunities at the moment to complete your practical experience. This is a great question. How should we prepare ourselves before beginning PLT? I would think carefully about the electives that you're choosing. If you are interested in going into more commercial work, then I would choose banking and finance and consumer law. If you did family law as an elective and that's where you want to practice, I would choose family law. If you really enjoyed your core criminal law, which I know you did a long time ago, but you've done some other criminal law electives, then I would choose the criminal law. Think very carefully because not only do you get the benefit of doing a practice-based perspective on that area of legal practice, you're also getting the benefit of your teacher, your clinical practitioner. When I introduced the colleagues tonight in the PLT team, you can see that all of them are practising in a particular area that they're teaching in. So you've had the opportunity to meet with them, particularly now on campus, to hear about their career decisions, their career paths, opportunities, etcetera. Other than that, I say there's nothing you need to do once you start PLT. As I said, that myth, the PLT is difficult, is a myth, but it does take regular work, so keep up to date. You'll get opportunities on campus to do your work, to ask questions about things like a practice file or other assessment tasks. And as I've said, you'll do some of your assessment tasks within that 15 days. But just keep up with the work. And as we say to all UTS students, you would have heard your teacher say this over again. Keep please, the lines of communication open if you're having trouble, if you've got some challenges in your personal or professional life, if you're finding it tough to get through PLT, reach outreach out to the programme head reach out to a subject cannot coordinate reach out to our director of students in the law faculty. We want to see PLT students, we want to get you into the profession. And so by keeping those lines of communication, we will accommodate you to the best of our ability. We have less flexibility now because of the requirement to come onto campus, but we can be flexible because we want you to get through. And the other thing I'll just talk about that it's we didn't have a slide because it's just been approved. There are exceptions to that 15 day on campus attendance. They are prescribed again by the LPAB and there are three grounds and exceptions. The first one is access. If you are unable to come onto campus because of access reasons, physical access reasons, you would go through the university's accessibility services to have the adjustments you're entitled to. If you are facing extreme financial hardship, you can apply to UTS Financial Assistance and they will assess you. It's a pretty tough bar to reach with extreme financial assistance, but of course you can make an application. And the third ground is residing out of Sydney, So if you reside more than 200 kilometres from UTS, you can make an application not to come onto campus. That information about the exceptions is on our current students web page. Sam, I might get you just to look up the current students web page if you can. If you've got time, we could pop that in the Q&A or in the chat for everyone to access that and that's where you'll find out more information. Moving on now. So good question about preparation and just enjoy this opportunity. It's your last time as a student. I know many of you are working full time, so it's not like you've got a whole lot of time, but make the most of building those connections that you will use in the profession. Do the 15 days of practical experience need to be completed consecutively? No they don't. You can do them across the semester or as I said, you can do some or all of them. Following your PLT, you need to do at least 4 hour blocks in a particular session. So if you're working, let's say a law firm, you have to do at least 4 hours a day to claim that amount or you can claim seven days. You can't, sorry, 7 hours. You can't claim more than 7 hours a day, even if you're working more than 7 hours a day. So I encourage you to have a look at the practical experience rules that will set out what the requirements are and how you access the forms through Career Hub to complete your practical experience. Do I need 3 spaces for subjects to do the PLT only? I do not need an extra space for patent sprints. Exactly. True. It's no credit points. So if you're, if you're doing your combined bachelor's degree and you've got to do 240 credit points. Oh sorry, that's not a good example because it's not in the in that if you're doing your Bachelor of Laws degree and you've only got 18 credit points left, that's perfect because there are your 3 PLT subjects. There's no no credit point practical experience, but it is a requirement. SO3 spaces is great. That works really well. If we do the early start rule, can you use your last three many electives as PLT? No, the PLT subjects are actually identified as PLT subjects. So they are prescribed and I've been through them tonight. Skills and Wills practise, Property and commercial practise, litigation practise. They are your 3 PLT subjects so you can if you've only got one or two electives. Let's say you've chosen Criminology and Business Business Principles in the Business Quality Doing combined degree, you could start your graduate certificate because you've only got 2 electives outstanding. Or if you've got one elective, let's say you've done all your law subjects except for three PLT, then you can move. You can apply to the early start rule if you've got one left saying science and start your graduate certificate. So you're finishing, for example, your combined law degree at the same time as you've started your graduate certificate. So I hope that makes sense. So if you're commencing your PLT in spring, when should I start trying to secure practical experience? If you're looking at practical experience as a gateway into a job or into a paid area of work. So you might be transitioning from a non law career, such as you might have been working in a hospitality or an or an admin or in other areas or another profession, for example. And you're looking at this as a stepping stone practical experience to a job, then you can start looking now. And obviously you can't count anything, but once spring starts at the end of July next year, you can count your 15 days then. If you're only looking for practical experience because it's a requirement and you're not interested in going into a particular area at this stage, you don't want to give up your current non law role, then I would start looking about 8 weeks beforehand because it can take some time depending on you know your background, what you're looking for etcetera. Whether you're able to take an unpaid position, you may not be able to in terms of your financial position, whether you're passionate about working in the not for profit sector, etcetera. Now I will say this, the the board have now required only 15 days. You may find when you're looking for practical experience that for example, a community legal centre may want a longer commitment of 15 days and you can understand that they've got to do an induction, they've been got to after the induction. You've got to learn the ropes, takes a while to settling before you can start doing some really worthwhile work, worthwhile work for the organisation as well As for yourself. So whilst you might only need to claim 15 days, you might find that you're being asked to work in that role for more than 15 days. So really just depends where your circumstances are. But if you'd like to send me an email, happy to elaborate on that a little bit more. OK. So I think that's all our question, Sam, is that everything from your perspective? I think you covered everything. Thanks, Maxine. Thank you Sam for your help. So thank you again everyone for attending. You'll get a copy of this recording as and I encourage you to spend some time looking at the current students page, looking at the other places practical experience rules. Have a look again at the slides. But by all means, if you've got any specific questions about your study, where you are and your degree, what you're thinking about, whether you're a UTS student or not a UTS student, you can either go through and make an appointment to have a A1 on one with me, or you can email me directlyitsmaxine.evis@uts.edu dot AU. And I look forward to seeing you in PLT in 2026. It's going to be very exciting. So thank you again for your attention and your great questions. Good night.