SeAMK TALK: Experiences of international guests from SeAMK International Days
[Sara]
Hello everyone, and welcome to SeAMK TALK podcast. We have International days going on here at SeAMK right now. And we have guests from 13 different countries and 30 different universities from all around the world.
And I have an honor to interview three amazing guests from all around the world. And welcome to all of you and thank you so much for coming here to this podcast. And let’s begin.
Can you tell what’s your name? Where do you come from? And what are your main tasks?
[Rose]
Thank you, Sara. It’s good to be here. My name is Rose Clark Nanyonga.
I’m an associate professor and a vice chancellor from Clark International University based out of Uganda, Kampala.
[Sara]
And what do you do in your university?
[Rose]
I run the university.
So the vice chancellor is the president of the university. My job is largely administrative oversight of the university with very little academic and research. So what I do in practice is operational oversight of the university.
So every activity that goes on academic operations of the university, research activities, I’m the principal accounting officer. So the finance and management of the university. I would know what is happening with all the student activities in the university.
A lot of stakeholder engagement, which is part of the reason that I’m here. That I’m also the first face of the university for all international relations and stakeholder management and strategic partners, both within the country and outside of the country.
[Sandra]
Okay. Hi. Nice for having me.
My name is Sandra Wahl. I’m from the University of Applied Sciences in Ansbach in Germany. And I’m in the student services.
So I’m more on the administrative side. I do the admissions, student counseling sometimes. So from their start at our university until they are finished with their degree, I’m there for them.
And I’m in charge for two degree programs. One is business administration and the other one is business informatics.
[Tommy]
And I’m Tommy Vorst. I work at Avans University in beautiful Sertogenbosch, the Netherlands. I work in the faculty of international business, but I’m a cultural specialist, mostly working with young people on their intercultural communication skills as they prepare for a semester or a year abroad.
And most of my administrative work at the university is also focused on internationalization. I’m the liaison for the International Students Association. I’m a liaison for the International Staff Association.
And I’m one of the people who pushes for a better international environment on campus.
[Sara]
Okay. Sounds very interesting. Now that you have been here to Finland and to SeAMK, what kind of program have you had during the International days?
If someone can tell what different kind of things you have had here.
[Tommy]
I guess we’ll go back in reverse order. I’ve attended some very informative lectures about how SeAMK runs its educational programs. I’ve had insights into things like entrepreneurship, but also teaching methodology.
I’ve had wonderful tours of the facilities and arguably the prettiest campus I’ve been on anywhere in Europe.
[Sara]
Wow. That’s amazing to hear.
[Rose]
Very true. Since I’m on the health sciences, so our university’s health sciences, so this morning I had the opportunity to tour all the simulation labs. And I met some impressive robots that are being used to simulate almost real life experiences for nurses and public health nurses and other health science students to learn and to become safer practitioners before they go out in the real world.
And it was one of the most impressive that I have seen. I also attended some really impressive lectures on the first day, the keynotes that we had about intercultural communication, pedagogy. I thought the professor of mathematics who gave his story of how his teaching has evolved was so personable and so pragmatic and was so insightful.
And I really appreciated such conversations because they help us to rethink our own strategy and to also re-evaluate our own journeys and how we are growing as professors in the international global field of teaching and learning. So it’s been an amazing experience, the international week here.
[Sandra]
I can also just agree with you both. Was an amazing week. Had a lot of lectures and workshops mostly on international office side as I’m administration and a lot of meetings with the international guys about our double degree, we have a double degree with your university.
So some of our students can come to your university, study there for a year and then get two degrees, one in Finland and one in Germany. So that’s quite nice. Your students can also come to our university and do that.
Yeah, so the exchange was quite nice, was amazing.
[Tommy]
If I can jump on something that Rose said, I was equally struck by that mathematics professor. As an older sort of staff member myself, I recognized a lot of what he said about having change forced upon you and how you do things and it takes time to recognize that those changes are probably going to make you a better teacher. But your initial reaction to them is, but I know what I’m doing and I don’t want to change those things.
Further to what you said, Sandra, about one of the best things about International Week is that I grew up conference organizing and I grew up in academia and the sheer number of administrators that are here who are really giving a different, first of all, it’s a lot less boring than if it were all teaching staff. Not to disparage my teaching colleagues, but we can get a little dusty when we get together. And to hear the operations of a university and the services provided to students, it’s a very different perspective from any conference I’ve been to before and I really appreciate that about what’s happening here at SeAMK.
[Rose]
Absolutely, and it was so well curated in that we all had unique experiences, we all felt really welcome and all of us had very tailored programs and we got to see different but same parts of what makes SeAMK great and I really appreciated that.
[Sara]
I’m glad to hear that. It’s very nice to hear that you have the feeling that you have got much during these days. Can you tell what have been the highlights or what have surprised you during the SeAMK International Days?
Tell me, you want to go first?
[Tommy]
I forgot my notebook.
[Sandra]
I would go first. I was surprised to hear that you do have to wait two years after your bachelor’s degree to do your master’s degree. That was quite, what?
A lot of our students do their bachelor’s and then follow up with the master’s. So, to have a break of two years is quite uncommon for us. That was a highlight for me, this information.
[Rose]
I think for me, and it came from the tours actually, many universities globally talk a lot about having an industry relationship and exposing their students to the industry experience, but you don’t actually get to see that because in some ways it takes a bit of investment, intentional investment, to create that kind of experience. I see a lot of that. I know it’s an applied university, so it needs to be putting efforts into that.
But when I watched, whether it is the skills laboratories or the school of engineering or the food and agriculture, there are a lot of intentional relationships that are built within the curriculum so that students have a relationship with the industry even before they graduate. That is already designed and folded into the curriculum. It was also clear in some of the programs that were showed to us, including the double degree programs, the internship portion is longer and so on.
That was not as surprising, but it was good for me to see that, not just talk about it, but that somebody is actually putting it into practice.
[Tommy]
I guess surprising. Maybe it’s because I’m naive. Maybe it’s because my job at Avans University in the Netherlands is the first job I’ve had at an applied sciences university.
I’d come from research universities before. I was quite struck by the industry and the collaboration that happens exactly between and it’s so close and it’s so intense, but that led me to believe that that was something Avans did, and I didn’t understand until really this week that, oh, this is how universities of applied sciences everywhere operate with those close ties. There’s a learning aspect there.
The other thing that I guess surprised me is that even though for the last eight years I’ve sort of welcomed students from around the world at Avans to a classroom where I’ve been teaching sort of a backup English course in addition to our regular English courses for students coming from around the world and to give them an opportunity to sort of mix together as a group, I didn’t realize how easy it is for a student at SEAMC to say, I’d like to go do a semester at a university in Germany or in Brazil or anywhere.
I had always assumed that would be quite a difficult process, but it seems to me that the networks we heard about, Heroes Network I think it was on the first day, that really made it sound like they’re working towards a sort of a concept of a pan-European university made up of nodes that are now individual universities. I think that’s a really strong sign that will allow things like joint degree programs and allow greater, what’s the word we use? Mobility for students and staff.
In our world today that’s a very promising development.
[Rose]
I think the related issue with mobility for me as well was surprising when I first got here because I was here almost seven years ago and international students were still going to university for free in Finland. Since then the government has changed the policy and now students have to pay. One of the things I appreciated was the conversation on the joint degree program because it does seem like universities are striving to create opportunities for international students, which allows international students to spend a couple of years here.
Instead of paying for four years, they end up paying for two years. They can have their first two years of learning in their country home, which is quite often much cheaper than what they would be paying here. I appreciate that there are efforts to create more opportunities for international students, particularly those outside of the European Union.
[Sara]
You already told something about the programs and different lectures that you have had here, but has there been any leisure program or was it all business throughout the day?
[Rose]
We’ve had fun. It’s been a packed schedule, but yesterday we had a tour of the city hall and we got to see the great library.
We got to see the church built or designed by Alvar Aalto. A great deal of history there. We went into the city hall and met some of the city council members who warmly welcomed us into the city.
We’ve seen some iconic features of Seinäjoki that I really appreciated. I don’t know what else my colleagues have seen.
[Sandra]
We went to the sauna as well. We had a sauna evening on Tuesday, I think it was. It was also quite nice.
We were all together, had some pizza and stuff, and then everyone went to the sauna or grabbed a snack. It was quite uncommon. It was not mandatory to do that and that.
You can do what you want at the time. We were there for two or three hours, I think. It was quite nice.
[Tommy]
Maybe you registered this under the category of surprises yesterday. At city hall, they treated us to a little bit of a snack afterwards and the president of your university sat down across from me and he looked at me and he said, Tommy, two words, Moroccan reggae. I said, yes.
He said, there’s a bar in town, Moroccan reggae bar. He says, many people are going, I think you should join us.
I’m an easy sell where that’s concerned. I missed that.
The idea that the president of the university, who also shocked me by being really young, so good for you.
[Sara]
Youngest in Finland.
[Tommy]
Is he? You also have the youngest mayor in Finland, right?
I think I heard someone say that the current mayor of Seinäjoki is also the youngest mayor in Finland.
[Rose]
I didn’t hear that, but I heard about the president.
[Tommy]
That’s what he drops on people. Like, hi, how are you? I’m glad you’re here.
Moroccan reggae. In fact, there wasn’t any, was there?
The owner of the bar apparently is a Moroccan who’s also in a reggae band. I see. The bar was really cozy.
Yeah, it was quite nice. It was really nice, but the music was less unique than we had expected. And it wasn’t live, it was recorded music.
But that doesn’t matter. I guess from the category of extracurricular activities, one of the really nice things about these events is that organically evenings out happen. I didn’t attend the sauna because I wanted to go for a long walk through a winter city, which I haven’t done in 10 years, and I was able to do that.
And if anybody had wanted to take a long walk, they could have also done that. And I feel like we sat and talked for quite a bit yesterday at that reggae bar, not reggae bar. And that conversation would not have happened on campus in between sessions.
[Sandra]
Exactly, that’s true. So there’s a lot of networking without networking.
[Rose]
Yeah, it’s people being people. Yeah. And I have a lot of old friends here because our university has had a relationship with SeAMK for 15 years.
So we know a lot more people who have retired. I had an opportunity to meet several of them. I met the Solo Optimists group.
I also attended the opening of the 50-year music festival with an amazing opera band right outside of SeAMK. So yeah, we’ve had some very nice, fun activities outside of the scheduled ones as well.
[Sara]
That’s great to hear. You have got to experience some little things that you can do here in Seinäjoki or in Finland. That’s good.
What things or insights can you possibly take back to your home university?
[Tommy]
I mean, that’s something I’m making notes about because in order to come here, in order to get permission from my home university to come here, I had to promise two moments, one where I deliver my findings to my academy and one where I deliver my findings to the whole university. And if I hadn’t promised to do those things, they wouldn’t have sent me. So I think the key thing is that mobility is really the answer to a lot of our problems.
And where I work in intercultural studies, we deal constantly with very confident young people who nevertheless aren’t yet aware that their way of doing things is localized and that they won’t learn that until they leave that local environment and go somewhere else. And the growth that takes place during that time is the biggest growth of their four years at our university. We constantly talk about how they leave as children when they go on there.
And they’re 19-year-old children or 20-year-old children, but they leave as children and then a year later they come back or six months later they come back and they’re adults in every sort of growth sense of the word. And it’s because they’ve had to be a fish out of water. It’s because they’ve had to adjust their perceptions of how communication works and what’s normal, which is a really big thing when you’re 19 years old.
And so I think the richness lies in not just the informal social connections that we make, but also the institutional ones where we provide opportunities for the students of SeAMK to go abroad and for SeAMK to welcome students from our universities.
[Rose]
I think one of the things that we learned during COVID-19 in 2020 was that we all belong in a global village, in a global space. But one of the critical issues at that time was that knowledge was not being shared across countries. And I think that opened our eyes to be more cognizant of why universities need to have this collaboration and be more intentional about shared knowledge and shared learning.
And global learning cannot occur unless we make efforts to foster those relationships and to create spaces that bring people together the way SeAMK does during the International Week. To stimulate each other, but to also learn how to co-exist in the global space and to realize how much more learning there is when we open our eyes to learn from each other. So I think that’s the message I’m taking back to Uganda and to Clark International University is that we need to be more intentional.
And I wrote on my social media that strategic partnerships, they require effort and they require commitment. And I hope that all of us who came here today can actually commit to continue in those relationships. And it doesn’t have to be just with SeAMK, it can be with Avans, it can be with other universities that we met here and say, oh, I remember him, he is doing this in the Netherlands.
Perhaps we can pursue a relationship to open up opportunities for global learning. And that provides opportunities for young countries such as ours. Uganda is the youngest country in the world.
The majority of our population are under the age of 35. We are going to need a lot of opportunities for all those young people to learn. And that’s why I come here, that’s why I go to other countries to create those opportunities.
And so I’m going back with hope that there are more people who are willing to create those opportunities. And so, yeah, I hope that we will continue to work together.
[Sandra]
Yes, quite nice saying, Rose. Thank you. For me, it was really the exchange with all the other universities.
So not only with SeAMK, but with mostly German universities, how they run their stuff, how they do their marketing, their international office, their student services, how they are connected. I was surprised to hear that you in the marketing direction do all the fairs and everything. That’s in a different part at our university.
And I was like, okay, perhaps we should combine them at some point. I mean, it’s not my decision. But perhaps I can get some new ideas at our university.
So that’s quite nice, yes.
[Sara]
Okay. So the last question that we have here is how has the partnership between your universities and SeAMK been so far?
[Sandra]
So we have a partnership.
We have the double degree. I don’t know since when. I know your president was in Ansbach in 2022, I guess, and played some chess.
So human chess at our university. Must have been quite fun. Yes, so the partnership is there.
And I hope we can get more into this, so we get more Finnish students to visit our university. That would be really, really nice.
[Sara]
Yeah.
[Tommy]
Yeah, I’m teaching staff, so I probably know a lot less than my administrative colleagues about the relationship per se. I will say that we definitely had more Finnish students visiting Avans University before the pandemic. And it feels like there’s a difficulty in re-establishing that mobility to the degree that it was.
I think one of the other side effects, and Rose mentioned the COVID pandemic, one of the other side effects is that we’ve all become maybe a little too comfortable staying home, not just literally in the house home, but also not staying too far from where we grew up and that sort of thing. And so I’d like to see more encouragement. I think Sam’s a really easy sell.
Like I know, because I’m a winter person, and I love this town. I’ve only been here four days, and I’m so excited. It was minus 10 today.
It’s like the best weather in the world as far as I’m concerned. But particularly from students in a country where winter isn’t winter, I’m going to be a winter snob, I think it’s really easy to tell students you could go to Seinäjoki and experience this, you know, really other world climactically than you’re used to. I think that’s much easier.
I think Uganda probably stands for the same thing. I think it’s much easier for me to tell students you should go to Uganda and see that they have an opportunity to experience something completely different. What’s odd is that most of my students anyway will look at Germany and say, well, it’s right there.
I could come home on the weekends. And I’m still satisfying my requirement abroad. And I speak a little German.
And so, yeah, maybe sort of something about the relationship is that enriching it and making it deeper and using weeks like this as an opportunity to expand our networks to new countries and new places and new schools is one of the valuable parts of being a partner. Because the truth is if the three of us worked at schools that weren’t partners with SeAMK, we couldn’t come to the conference in the first place.
[Rose]
Exactly. Absolutely. And that’s a really great thing to segue into.
The fact that we are all here is one way of demonstrating that the partnerships are working. We’ve probably had the longest partnership with SeAMK through the HADACO, the Health Africa Development Agency, which was established about 30 years ago. And it brought together eight applied science universities, including some, Vaasa, Centria, Mikkeli, Tampere, Oulu, and a few others.
The cooperation has been largely on faculty and student exchanges. So every year we send our faculty here for benchmarking and learning from the School of Nursing and Midwifery. And we send two or four students here, sponsored, and they spend a semester here.
And then we host about eight to 15 students from Finland once a year at my university, Clark International University, and they are there for the whole semester. And they do rotations and learn about our health system. And the credits they earn there is counted towards their degree here so they don’t actually lose a semester. At least a thousand students have gone through that program combined. Of course not just SeAMK students but all over Finland and they’ve gone on to do really really good work.
So we are very happy to be part of such a large transformative and impactful collaboration. My work here this time was to look at what other opportunities exist beyond the faculty and student mobility. Perhaps double degree programs or joint programs.
All projects that we can collaborate on in terms of research and innovation within the disciplines that mirror what SeAMK is doing. So I look forward to additional opportunities to continue the collaboration with SeAMK.
[Sara]
Thank you so much for your comments and that’s all the questions that I had for you guys today. But do you have something that you would like to add or say?
[Rose]
Thank you Sara. Thank you so much for hosting us and my colleagues. But I also wanted to say to thank you to Jaakko, the president for such a warm welcome here and for all the hospitality and all the administrators who have looked after us while we were here.
We are eternally grateful. We promise to pay back. So welcome to Uganda.
[Sandra]
Thank you from me as well. It was nice having us here. I think we all had a great time.
So with everyone I talked was just amazed by your organization. The whole program, everyone was so welcoming, was great. But I have a question for you Sara.
What are you planning on going abroad or something? Do you pursue some international experience?
[Sara]
Well why not? I’m very open-minded and I love international things. So why not?
I don’t have anything specific on my mind right now. But it’s a possibility absolutely.
[Tommy]
If I can add one small thing, it’s a little shout out to the student volunteers who did yeoman’s work in making the conference possible, getting us to the rooms where we needed to be and making sure sessions ended on time and were really easy to find. That’s something else that you did really well. Everybody who knew what they were doing was wearing the same t-shirt.
That was really helpful because whenever you were lost you could sort of go, I’m sure that person over there knows what they’re doing.
Thank you student volunteers.