”I have my hobby as a job”
Meet our teachers
Anders Cajander is lecturer and Head of the Division of Health Informatics and Logistics at campus Flemingsberg. He worked for many years in the business sector until he, in 2014, became a teacher at CBH. And he loves his job. He thinks that his upbringing, in combination with a natural commitment to education, is what makes him a good teacher.
Anders Cajander’s father was a radio amateur and there were plenty of electronics in his father’s radio room. There were no computers when he grew up, but as a teenager, he practised at a research lab at Umeå University. After that, all he’s done has been about electronics and hardware-dependent programming and it’s no coincidence that he teaches everything that has to do with hardware-dependent development – embedded systems, operating systems and telecommunication.
What do you think makes you a good teacher?
– I think it’s actually an advantage that I come from a non-academic background, where everyone was simple people, craftsmen, and you learnt from one another. That means I had to learn things from scratch, with the help of good teachers. When I teach, I try to remember – what did I find difficult in the beginning? How can I explain this so that everyone understands? I always encourage the students to let me know if there’s anything they don’t understand or if I can do something different to improve my teaching.
– I think perhaps my upbringing has also contributed to my belief that the best way to learn is to practise your skills. This is a vision that I’ve had the possibility to realize, thanks to support from my manager Sebastiaan Meijer and my colleagues. In Flemingsberg we have both well-equipped labs for research and teaching and a Makerspace with different kinds of equipment, for the students’ project work.
What makes you so committed?
– I think it comes naturally to me. I’m convinced that everyone’s good at something, it’s just a question of finding out what it is. For me, it seems to be teaching. I find teaching very rewarding, and one can say that I have my hobby as a job.
– Reading in a course evaluation “When Anders explains, I understand” means a lot to me. I’m incredibly happy if I can get just one person to understand what I try to convey.
What else helps you in your daily work?
– In Flemingsberg, almost all teachers are situated in the same corridor. That means we see each other during coffee breaks and that we can easily solve problems when we run into each other in the corridor. It also means that the programme directors are close to the teachers. We are about to introduce a kind of competence cluster so that there will be at least three people within every area of competence. If one teacher retires, the other two can instruct a new teacher.
– For the same reason, we also teach each other’s courses. This way of working was absolutely crucial during the pandemic. It also creates a good team spirit and enables us to help each other.
– I would also like to point out the advantage of having a division with both teachers and researchers, which was the result of the school merger and us becoming CBH. Now we can take part of the latest research and apply it to our teaching. During their first year, our students’ project work is strictly controlled by us teachers, since they have to learn the methods. But already in their second year, they are very driven and motivated, which means that the researchers have a bunch of motivated and skilful students who can help out. If we didn’t have the research, we would stagnate in our teaching – and the researchers wouldn’t have any students to help them out. We have a very good mix here. Now, the industry has discovered how good our students are too, and they’re more or less fighting over them.
In other words, you wake up happy on Monday morning?
“I definitely do. I’m always happy to go to work again on Monday morning, it’s more a question of going home on time …
Text: Åsa Karsberg