UniOulu Applicant guide 2027 - Product brochure - Page 44
Brilliant Alumni Stories
High-ranking university
and a friend’s experience
made Md Shariful Alam
choose Oulu
Now that Md Shariful Alam has settled in Finland and spent
10 years in the country, he can look back at his time in the North.
The initial adjustment was challenging, but he found himself
enjoying many things in Oulu.
Study in Finland? Why not!
In 2015, Alam started to look for things in
Finland that would interest him, and he found
a programme in the University of Oulu, which
seemed like a great fit.
In 2016, Alam enrolled in the Biomedical
Engineering programme and specialised in
signal and image processing.
“The work was about interpreting the signals
from an electrocardiogram, or ECG, and making
it easier for doctors and medical staff to get
more meaningful alarms based on the data,”
Alam says.
This was Alam’s first time travelling outside
of Bangladesh, and the complete change of
environment was overwhelming at first.
“I hadn’t lived this far from my family before,
and it took time to adjust to everything. Even
if I knew about Finland, I didn’t know about
the darkness and winter! But in
Oulu, I found good people in the
Bangladeshi community and
Read
the international community in
the full
general,” Alam says.
story:
Alam started playing cricket
with his newfound friends, and he
found that exercise and spending
time outside in nature helped him
get settled.
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“It was good to build social contacts and be
in good shape. I explored the entire Oulu with
my bike, also in the winter, because I had winter
tyres. I fell a couple of times, but nothing too
serious,” Alam says with a laugh.
Finns are sometimes thought of as
being quiet almost to the point of seeming
difficult to approach, but Alam doesn’t
subscribe to his view.
“Finns are calm, yes, but when you need help,
they are quite eager to assist you. I remember
arriving in Finland with all my luggage and
getting on the train. A Finnish lady showed me
the luggage lockers,” Alam says.
Relocating to Helsinki
During his studies in Oulu, Alam says he shifted
from theory-based things to more practical
issues and more to working on software.
After graduating in 2019, he was employed
by GE Healthcare in Helsinki. He is working on
an intensive care unit monitoring device and
specifically its ECG module.
“At first, I was fascinated with the technology,
but now I can see the human value of the work
that we do.”
Alam says that he has become very healthconscious in Finland. And while he hadn’t travelled
abroad before coming to Finland in 2016, he has
now travelled to 20 countries for work and leisure.
