During this week Malmö university has been fully active in Hong Kong.
4 students from Graphic design and Interaction design participates in a week long workshop. A part of the workshop is to attend the Hong Kong Business of Design Week Opening ceremony that we just have been at. Now Jörgen Halldin Generalkonsul, opening the Swedish part of BoDW. And the truth is we can be proud of our Swedish design brands (and educations).
Today there was a ceremony at university. The organisation called Anqa for quality assurance of universities (I believe it is similar to our UKÄ), has distributed some certificate of attendance to a training course. For this ceremony there has been a lot of preparation done by the employees at northern university, for instance the poster in the picture has been prepared in few days.
Poster for the Anqa ceremony
It describes the latest events and collaboration of the university, for instance Nune’s staff exchange to Malmö, 2 polish exchange students who have been in Yerevan, some other trip of the staff to Palermo, to Austria and others.
There has been also a short film made of interviews to different people of the university, including me!
The ceremony started at 10:00. We sat in an auditorium, quite many people were participating. The rector, vice rector and the head of this organisation Anqa welcomed everyone.
After that the expert and the public had a discussion (kind of panel, people saying their opinion or asking questions and the the expert were answering). After that there was the distribution of the certificates. One of the responsible of the quality assurance at Northern university Lilit Zakaryan got the certificate (very nice and colourful!)
The ceremony ended at 13:00 with a buffe’ of fruit and sweets.
On the 26th I went to the university knowing that I had 2 meetings scheduled, one at 11:00 with the computer engineering department and the other after lunch with the quality assurance department. However, when I arrived in the morning at work I got to know that the first meeting was canceled. Instead, I went to the library, and the librarian Julia, offered me turkish coffee, fruit and chocolate. She also gave me a present, a book with the title: “Realities as if unknown to turks”, a collection of letters written by armenians about the genocide, written in four languages: Russian, Armenian, Turkish and English.
Julia and Martin
The library was quite small and the books were old. There was no computer in the library, the borrowing of the books is done manually. Actually, there was none in the library, the librarian said that armenian students do not like to read books! (similar to our students? 😉
The second meeting was also canceled today, it is shifted to next week. It seems that they are quite flexible with the meetings!
27/11
The meeting with the computer engineering department was rescheduled on the 27th. I had no idea of what was the agenda and who would come to the meeting (I would not accept this in Sweden!). The evening before I browsed a bit the site of our faculty in order to be prepared for the meeting. When I arrived at university, I went directly to the meeting room and it was full of people, mostly students but also faculty staff. They asked me to talk about the TS faculty, so I improvised a presentation of TS (thanks to Filippa T since she sent me a ppt presentation of TS). One of the faculty member translated my talk. After that they asked me specific questions, like what programming languages do we teach, detailed of the web design course, and of the database course. They also asked me about the research and example of projects. That was a difficult question, I do not have a good overview of the research done at our computer science department and know nothing about the projects at IMP. I searched and showed some slides from the latest presentation of the IOTAP research center.
Presentation of TS
In the evening, I got a video of the presentation (a slideshow with music), which is also available on Youtube:
On monday I had my first presentation about Malmö University at 13:00, but I couldn’t sleep the night before!! Nervous or jet lag or dry air? Finally I fell asleep around 4am (1am swedish time).
It was my first day at work, the plan was that Nune (my contact person) present Northern university, she would also translate my presentation.
I arrived at uni few minutes before 13, we went directly to the rector office. Entering his office made me the feeling of going back in time, the room had one big oval table with many chairs around it, the rector desk did not have a computer on it! There was a secretary just before the entrance of the office. After greeting each other and leaving my jacket and bag, we went up to the fifth floor.
I entered the room of the presentation, this look like any other meeting rooms, a big round table, a projector screen and a projector on the table. The room was full with people and they were all watching at me! I was so excited that I did not take any picture during the whole day! Hopefully I will do that the coming days! On the table there were plates with sweets, juice water and some other stuff. Nune presented to me all the people around the table, she had also invited some students from the language department. I presented the general Malmö university english presentation plus some slides of TS faculty and english programmes at our faculty. When I show the slide “questions?” there were really many questions! I have never got so many question on a presentation (except when I defended my PhD thesis). That was actually fun, the audience have been listening to me with interest and were curious about the Swedish system! I got the following questions (I probably have forgotten some questions):
Salary of teachers (embarrassing question!)
Students paying a fee, (I explained the system with credits and that the students have to pass a certain amount of credits in order to get their salary)
Students trying to stay longer at university because they get a salary
Percentages of students finding a job
How many percent of students are good
Business incubator (from a student, I had to google to know what it is!)
Students dropping out, and why
Why do we have so many students (do we?)
Why are we successful (are we?)
Main income /product in Sweden
How is research funded
How many universities are public, and private
How would the Swedish government react if Armenia would start Swedish courses?
What is the goal of my trip
Why did I choose Armenia
What am I going to do here
Why did I move to Sweden
We had some discussion about gender, they have the same problem in IT with gender inequality.
During my presentation I heard some bells ringing, at 14:00 and at 14:15. I guess it was the break between lectures, it reminded when I was in primary school. Actually the whole university reminded me of an elementary school I attended in Italy, simple, the rooms are with few furnitures, just small desks and chairs. the entrance door is small.
A classroom of Northern University
After my presentation, many left, so it was decided to skip Nune’s presentation for the day.
We went to the rector office again, where I was offered armenian wine and cognac. We sat around the table, me, Nune, the rector and vice rector and another man (do not remember his role). The secretary prepared the glasses with the water, and cognac (or wine). We toasted to “the small countries”, the rector wanted to find a similarity between Armenia and Sweden. We talked about history of Armenia and todays world history and economy (very challenging for me!) and the hope that Armenia will become again a successuffull country like it has been before the genocide in 1915. The rector excused himself for not knowing English, he said that when he was young he thought that armenian would become a big language.
They asked me if Sweden has diaspora (i.e. if many swedes are living outside Sweden). I answered that there are swedes living in other countries but it is not a big phenomena. Just for information, Armenia has 3 million inhabitants, but there are 10 millions armenian living in other countries (since the genocide in 1915).
After chatting a bit, I got a book from the rector about quality assurance at the Northern university, then we sayd good bye.
21/11
When I arrived to Yerevan (at 11:30 of the 21st november), Nune was waiting for me with Jacob and Martin, we went all together to the apartment where I will stay for the whole month.
The first interesting thing was the elevator! The keyboard of the elevator has 14 buttons in total, 12 for the floors, one for the bell and another for the bottom floor. However, the number 3 was modified (by hand) to 13, the number 8 was deleted, the button with the bell was modified to 8. So, where is the number 3? and which button should I push if the elevator stops?
Anyway, the apartment is very nice, on the 13th floor according to the elevator (but it is the 12th floor by counting each floor), well furnished and with a very nice view!
22/11
I spent the saturday by myself, unpacking and trying to organise my life in Yerevan. I went out for tourism and for learning my way in the city. My apartment is in Tumanyan street, very central, close to the opera house and to the french square and the cascade complex.
Cascade complex in Yerevan
I met 2 girls, Sylvia and Sara that welcomed me to Yerevan! That was nice, they were very social and nice, they pointed me where to buy a map. In the end there was a small surprise! These girls were Jehova witness, and left me a flyer about that (they are everywhere!)
