Government of Timor-Leste

Last Friday, the Ministry of Finance held a farewell ceremony to twenty one scholarship students that are going to Australia, as the implementation/undertaking of one of the great successes of the ministerial reform in the area of training, through the PDP (Professional Development Program) launched in the middle of 2008.

The young scholarship students, in a total of twenty-one persons (of both genders), will join two others students that have already left in the beginning of February of this year. They are twenty-three scholarship students that will attend Flanders University, in Adelaide, South Australia, in the areas of economy, accounting and taxes.

The selection process took around one year for Masters (4 persons) and Undergraduate (19 persons) candidates. Of the latter, two persons are still finalizing their visa process.

There were sixty-one candidates for the undergraduate course, of which fifty-three passed the administrative exam and undertook a sequential written test. Of these, only twenty passed with one student resigning.

In regards to the Postgraduate, of eleven candidates, ten were selected/eligible but only four decided to continue their studies for the Masters. Two have already left in February, the others will leave this week.

Before initiating their studies, the scholarship students will submit to an intensive training period in English for academic purposes, at the “Intensive English Language Institute” in the same university, for the maximum duration of one year, according to the capacity degree of each student.