With the move of various schools to move away from the term University wide studies the english Bachelor degrees have decided to compile a list of ‘Basic optional courses’ for the required 3+cr from this list each majour select the ones their degree students can choose from the complete list. QT optional basic course (old UWS) has already been updated on the curriculum page https://into.aalto.fi/display/enbsctech/Quantum+Technology+2022-2024
Admission criteria will be unchanged for 2023 with just the addition that the pathway studies admission criteria will be provided by the Academic Affairs Committee(AAC). The current draft from the AAC states the requirements as passing all courses while passing the maths with average grade of at least 3.00/5.00 with tie breaker the calculus score and then all tied students will get accepted.
Study options intake will see an increase in Computational Engineering being pushed down from the top combined with 5 extra places being made avialable for Pathway studies in both the Digital Systems and Design as well as Computational Engineering paths.
The AllWell results has been discussed, there’s been a higher general stress and risk of burn-out. With peer support especially significantly lower than pre-covid years.
There’s been a feeling of ‘need to return to campus’ while maintaining lecture recordings from the students, it’s been noted that the ideal is to return to contact teaching fully with potential to have a lecture repository available on special cases, it’s further been noted that contact teaching assist students forming peer group as well that during the epedimic years there’s not ben properly invested into remote methods and converting potential candidate courses to remote structure rather just having thrown contact courses onto a remote format.
The course descriptions and pre-requisite information has been mentioned as being sub standard as it frequently ends up with just a copy + paste situation from older courses.
Regarding the stress levels it’s been noted that tuition liable students are experiencing noticeably more stress around completing their studies. A long discussion on impacting factors and ways to alleviate this has followed, it was noted that one of the main stress factors has been concern around finances running out forcing them to abandon their studies before they can complete it.
For tuition liable students continueing to Masters studies the Masters Scholarships came up for discussion, even though the students have already graduated granting Masters studies scholarships falls under the committee’s responsibilities. The current criteria for the scholarship is that tuition liable students needs to complete their studies within 3 years as well as achieve a GPA of 3.8 or higher. After some discussions it’s been decided to pull statistics related students that’s completed their B.Sc both from the tuition liable as well as non liable student pools to be able to see percentages of students making the cut-off in both categories and whether that relates to prefered percentage of scholarships, in essence to determine whether the current GPA cut-off is to high or not. Essentially the scholarship cut-off should not be super difficult but it should still be a challenge.
Staff / student event schedules has been discussed, more for information to the staff than any real relevance (except Orientation week schedule). Only impactful event is the webinar for the prospective new English B.Sc students (2022 Fuksis), the main goal of the webinar is to get as many of the prospective students to accept the student application and thus answer questions, student representatives are considered beneficial to provide a student perspective and might get invited to participate. The Seminar will be held online on 9.6 @13-16 with QT having a breakout session from 15-16.
Finaly there’s been an introduction to the Aalto Student recruitment team. Outside of working with the Aalto student marketing team and student Ambassadors they also have monthly meetings with schools participate in fairs and events both in Finland as well as internationally. They further handle surveys on application processes as well as to candidates that’s declined their Aalto study offer.
Through interaction with study partners they’ve had 57 eligible Bachelors students and 48 eligible Masters applications with only 8 ineligible applicants (mostly due to SAT availability during the pandemic).