Mikael Fernstrom

>It has been a few very intense days in the Computer Science department at UL. With all student events coinciding, ranging from our first cohorts undergraduates in music, media and performance technology (MMPT) and in digital media design (DMD) showing their Final Year Projects, to the Masters students in Interactive Media and in Music Technology showcasing their course work Lighthouse eleMENTAL, it’s been a great week. The creative energy in the work the students delivered is almost positively overwhelming.

Thinking back a few years, around 2005, when we finished writing the new curricula for DMD and MMPT, envisioning a new kind of graduate that could handle both aesthetics and technology, science and art, working and living in a computer-augmented world, it is just amazing how this year’s students have made our digital dreams come true. Initially, when we proposed the new courses, there was quite a lot of resistance to the radical change we suggested, while we had a strong belief in the necessity for changing the profile of our future graduates. We knew, from talking to young people looking for something interesting and relevant to study, that we needed a multidisciplinary approach. We also knew from our contacts with industry that they had difficulties finding graduates with a more creative and all-rounded profile. Last but not least, we know that students had to be introduced to what research is ideally already from their first year at university. When the new programmes had been approved and more than twice the number of students we had anticipated arrived, the hard work started – both for the students and for faculty. It feels like a real reward for all the laborious hours we have invested and all the money it required to modify laboratories, lecture rooms and to have new recording studios built, that we finally have a large group of excellent students, ready to take on the future.