by Phumla Mkize
He’s only 33 years old, but Tshwane University of Technology (TUT) lecturer Dr Prosper Sotenga, has two Master’s and two Doctoral degrees.
Dr Proper Sotenga started as a student at TUT and now he is lecturer at the Department of Engineering.
Sotenga – who joined the University as a student and went on to achieve four degrees at TUT as well as two others through TUT-partner programmes – is now one of its outstanding lecturers.
He was among the 24 academics who were honoured with the “2023 Improvement of Qualification: Doctoral” Award in November at the annual Academic Excellence Awards. The awards are hosted by Vice-Chancellor and Principal, Prof Tinyiko Maluleke, to celebrate the University’s top performers.
Sotenga – an Electrical Engineering lecturer at the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment (FEBE) – started his studies at TUT in 2010, when he enrolled for a Diploma in Electrical Engineering.
“A university of technology, and in particular TUT, is the best institution to start your education, especially for technical fields such as Engineering and Computer Engineering."
“You are taught the practicality of the theory before you learn the theory. That can encourage you to move forward because you see science applied in real life. You are able to build prototypes and solve real-life problems,” he said.
He said his experiential training made him fall in love in with Electrical Engineering. He participated in projects at the OR Tambo International.
“We also used to troubleshoot some of the electronic equipment on the Rooivalk [helicopter],” he said about some of the work he engaged in as part of his experiential training.
After completing his diploma, he enrolled for the BTech in Electrical Engineering.
He said he was more interested in solving problems than working in industry. Armed with a BTech, he embarked on Master’s degree studies.
He was lucky to be enrolled in a dual Master’s qualification, offered by TUT in partnership ESIEE Paris, an Engineering school in France that created the French-South African Institute of Technology (F’SATI), in collaboration with the former Technikon Pretoria, which became TUT in 2004.
At the end of the three-year programme, Sotenga graduated with an MTech in Electrical Engineering from TUT and an MSc in Electronics from ESIEE.
“The MSc was very involving. Coming from a university of technology where the emphasis is on the practical element, it was quite an adjustment to do advanced theory from the French side,” he said. “It opened my eyes to a lot of things and it helped me with the MTech that was research based,” he said.
He said he was lucky to have the support of colleagues who were enrolled for the same qualification.
“We would stay at the lab until 2am to study. Whoever understood a concept better, had the responsibility to teach the rest of us and you know what they say, ‘as you teach, the more you understand’.
“If you think you understand something, teach and the more you teach the more you understand,” he said.
He turned down an offer to improve his MTech research to make it equivalent to a PhD.
“I refused because I wanted to try something else,” he said.
After graduating with his dual Master’s degrees, Sotenga enrolled in another programme, a dual doctoral programme offered by TUT and Université Paris-Est Créteil, commonly known as UPEC.
His research was in the field of Telecommunications.
“Though the qualification is in Electrical Engineering, my speciality is Telecommunications, that is, dealing with anything related to transmission of information – wireless or wired over a distance.
“I focused on issues related to the interconnection of different devices. These days it is not only the phone that is connected to the network; you have computers, fridges, cameras, machines … This is what is known as the internet of things. I looked at how it affects the performance of the network. I proposed a strategy to minimise the impact on the network when you have a large scale of devices connected to it.
“The whole idea was to manage what we call network resources. I produced a strategy to increase the ability of having more devices even within the constraints of a spectrum,” he said.
Sotenga has a Doctorate in Electrical Engineering and another one in Computer Science.