Nordic countries are really famous for their furniture and interior design. Stockholm is one of the paradise for interior lovers. There are really a huge amount of tremendous interior shops.
Last weekend I went to a shop called Illums Bolighus in the centre, and the afternoon spent there is really a remarkable one. Among the products there, you can experience the attitude to interior of the designers here and the most beautiful craftwork in this area.
Last weekend, me and a group of friends went skiing in the north of Stockholm. It was a nice time to get close to the nature and refresh myself from work.
The ski ground is in Flotssbru. It takes about 1 hour to go there from the center. The price for the ski pass is around 200kr, depending on the time, and rent of the equipment is around 200kr. Nice to go!
On 26th, March, Tuesday, I’m going to do an interview to a Swedish Company called SenseGraphics.
SenseGraphics is a company that facilitate application development of haptic, and co-located hapto-visual applications. It is founded in 2004 in Stockholm. Over the years, SenseGraphics has brought up great products such as the H3D API for the haptic application developers, and a series of haptic and visual applications. For example, you can easily do digital 3D modelling with your hands via their haptic 3D input device.
SenseGraphics is really on the cutting-edge of the haptic application research and development, which is one of the most popular HCI research field. Additionally, this company is really low-profile, partly because of they are majorly providing platforms for developers in this field. In the near future, I believe there will be market bloom of haptic applications, and then you will probably get to know this company.
If you are interested in this area as well as Swedish working culture, just follow my blog and there will be an interview video about this company!
SpaceExplorer by SenseGraphics
SenseGraphics: http://www.sensegraphics.com/index.php
As the admission process goes on, most of the applicants have probably received the results and some of you may see the status of conditionally qualified. Recently some of the perspective students asked me several questions on Merits, so I summarise all the points, and share with all of you in this blog.
What is Merits?
Merits are the grades given by KTH when evaluating perspective students. Based on country, nationality, and the score of application materials, students will be placed in different selection categories. Each student will receive a merit rating. Different programs will have different ranges of merits, and usually the ranges are either 0-100 or 0-1000.
How to interpret the Merits?
First, the higher merits you got, the larger opportunity you get to get admission and scholarships. Second, the places or plans KTH made to perspective students also greatly affect the opportunity of getting admission. According to some official news, the number of places is increasing these years.
I have collected some informal data as reference for you to evaluate your merits roughly before the final results. Usually, if you get a merits over 75% of the range, then you are hopefully to be admitted. And if you get a merits over 85%, then you should keep an eye on applying the scholarship!
Related Informations:
Important Points summarised by Xintong: http://www.kth.se/blogs/xintong/2012/01/important-things-to-remember-when-applying/
Application BBS: http://bbs.chinasky.se/
Recently I’ve a lot of conversations on teaching styles with my friends who are studying in different countries. From all the conversations, I extracted several points to share with those who are currently receiving admissions from different universities and trying to figure out which university may fit best to your own learning style.
It is said by a lot of people that European graduate schools is course based education, while American graduate school is research based. In fact, recent years, with the various requirements increasing in research field, the major of American graduate schools are also taking the course based model.
Compared to other countries, the Swedish teaching style can be reflected by the following points:
1. Education in Sweden puts more emphasis on teamwork. Studying in U.S. schools is basically doing individual projects rather than teamwork. However teamwork is closer to the actual situation of work, where communication and management skills really matter. On the other hand, individual projects are good way to reinforce individual ability efficiently, but often cooperation is ignored in the process. Both the two modes have their pros and cons, which can greatly affect your study life in your future school .
2. Short-power distance characteristics of Swedish culture appears in school education as well. Compared to the U.S., where professors really have high authority, in Sweden professors are very approachable. While the American professors are straightforward, Swedish professors are patient and mild. When American professor will say “No, that’s wrong.” Swedish professors will usually say “Maybe you can the try.”
3. KTH shares advantages on great extent of internationalisation, where the university puts much emphasis when recruiting new students. Compared to many other countries, the population of Chinese people in Sweden can be regarded as small, which also creates a good opportunity to push you to the true internationalisation. Many of my friends who are studying in the States told me that within their everyday life circle it’s basically Chinese people, for there’re so many Chinese there, making it hard to get out of the group. In Sweden, the situation will be quite different, rare Chinese here can sometimes make you feeling lonely, however it pushes you more to get contact with the local cultures and get to know more international friends. In the context that the school focuses on teamwork, the learning process can offer you the great chance to learn a lot of foreign culture from international students as well.
That’s the major points I summarised when I compare the different teaching styles between Sweden and other countries. Welcome leaving your experiences on the comments!
This Friday morning, our group went to Waterfront to meet our mentor for our business course, who is currently an execute director of a worldwide famous magazine, taking charge of the Nordic Area.
Our mentor has a really beautiful personality. Our meeting that day starts with a short session of tasting the cake made by our mentor. We explained why we pivoted to a new business plan and presented our new plan to him. And later, we have a long discussion about the marketing strategy of the product with him, and received quite a lot useful feedbacks.
Waterfront (on the right), 2013
This Tuesday night, I went to another meetup held by the Stockholm Entrepreneurs group. The organizer is a former entrepreneur in music industry from Seattle. The whole atmosphere of this meetup is quite nice. There’re people from every corner of Stockholm doing different businesses. Some of them are investors looking for promising projects, some of them are start-up companies looking for new member or investment.
I talked to two of the investors that night about my current business plan, and got some nice feedbacks and also got the opportunity to further present my plan to them. Both of them are really nice and easy to talk with, which reminds me one thing that in Sweden, power-distance is really quite short.
If you are interested in making start-ups and establish your own company, I will Sweden is a nice place to go, since opportunities of finding investment is really one of the most important things during start-up phase.
Stockholm Entrepreneur Group: http://www.meetup.com/StockholmEntrepreneurs/
Presented our group project in a meetup event at Spotify Headquarter yesterday! Great opportunities to meet people with similar interests, especially on start-up! Nice food and talks!
KTH uses the 4 periods(2 semester) system for study plan. Usually autumn semester lasts from middle August to middle December, and spring from middle January to middle May. So every period lasts 8 weeks, and now it’s the ending of Period 3.
I have just finished the course Information Visualisation. The professor’s teaching style is quite nice to me, which is full of rightly openness to students. The facility in the Visualisation Lab can be regarded as awesome as well. You can see almost all the most updated equipments there, and the 4K resolution 3D projectors and display is really impressive.
Our group did an information visualisation project of developing the yearly view for Google Calendar. Two groups did really fantastic music visualisation.
As language is one of the most important factors in study program choices, today we are going to look at a recent research on English(as second language) Proficiency Index among 54 countries. The surveys are done by Education First among 1.7 million adults across 54 countries. It’s the largest study of its kind.
Sweden ranked 1st in the English Proficiency Index, which is corresponded to my personal experiences after a cross-European trip. Most Swedish people you can meet here have no problems in communicating in English, including the elder generations, while in a lot of other European countries, it’s totally different situations.
To see the full survey: www.ef.com/epi
