The main discussion topic at the first English Bachelor’s Programme Committee meeting of the year, on 8th of February, was the admission renewal process for the English-taught programs. The idea would be to have two separate application periods in January and March instead of only in January. The goal is that this would align better with the application period for Finnish-taught programs. At the same time it would allow to take into account the different categories of applicants and make it possible to have the admission results for international students earlier. Currently, both Finnish and international students can apply in the same application period in January with either matriculation exam results or SAT results. Some years the applicants have had to wait approximately six months for the admission results. Another problem is that applicants can get a study place offer from all the six places they apply to and have to decide in mid-July whether they accept. At this point even if the study place is then offered to someone else, they may have already decided to go study somewhere else and for students outside of the EU this timing may be too late for the residence permit process.
The discussion was in favor of making some changes to this process. Different options were presented and the most popular one seemed to be that there would be SAT/ACT-based selection in January and certificate-based selection in March. This would be quite simple to execute and could speed up the admission process for international students applying with SATs. However, a possible difficulty would be that Finnish students could still apply in January with SAT-results and then also in the second joint application and wait for both results before deciding which would again slow down the process. There are still some considerations and future developments that have to be discussed further.
Other topics that were discussed briefly in the meeting were the new major, Computer Engineering, and the webinars organised for admitted students during the summer. Some people had doubts that the name Computer Engineering would be misleading as the program has to do more with computer hardware than computer science and that it is very similar to the existing program Computational Engineering. In addition, some professors questioned whether the webinars are useful and worth their time. Student representatives were in favor of the webinars and it was concluded that they are useful for getting to know the program and other admitted students. One opinion also was that these webinars could be a good opportunity to inform students about other services and opportunities at Aalto other than getting only a degree.
The next meeting of the committee will be on 15th of March.