What I will carry with me the longest is how much the university genuinely cared about us as people.

I am Vincenzina, and I graduated from Lapland UAS in 2026 with a Bachelor of Engineering in Machine Learning and Data Engineering. Today I live and work in Switzerland as a Data Engineer at an energy trading company, where I build data pipelines from external systems, develop forecasting models, and automate business processes that used to live in endless Excel sheets. I work mostly with Python and SQL.

The courses that pushed me further than I thought I could go

One of the highlights of my studies were the courses led by Tuomas Valtanen. He took us from the basics of Python all the way through cloud machine learning and deep learning principles, and he genuinely pushed us to our limits, and then a little beyond. What those projects gave me was not just technical knowledge but something harder to name, a kind of confidence that when I face an unfamiliar machine learning problem, I have enough foundation to find footing.

A taste of how the real world actually works

Another experience I treasure was a Blended Intensive Program through Erasmus+, where students from three European universities came together across two sessions, one in Rovaniemi and one in Vienna, with online collaboration in between. We worked on sustainability projects as a mixed international group, meeting online across borders and coming together to present in person.

At the time it felt like a study exchange program. Looking back, it was a near perfect mirror of how most offices function today, also in my personal experience. The majority of my meetings are online, my colleagues are spread across the globe and the ability to collaborate asynchronously and then show up and present is exactly what that program trained us for. The networking aspect of it was great too, hearing how students from other universities approached the same problems differently opened my mind in many ways.

Being a name, not a student number

What I will carry with me the longest is how much the university genuinely cared about us as people. Even through tough times, whether academic or personal, the counsellors and teachers showed a level of empathy that I did not take for granted then and I certainly do not now. I had a name there, not just a place in the statistics, which in my opinion matters more than many realise for long term mental well-being and academic outcomes.

What I enjoy most about where I am now

I work in financial analytics and data, which is not the direction I originally imagined for myself, but data is data when you really break it down, and the knowledge I built at Lapland UAS has proven itself to be incredibly versatile. I can jump into projects across completely different domains and never feel completely lost; this adaptability is the greatest thing my studies gave me professionally speaking.

My advice to current and aspiring students

Do not be scared of the self study periods. Do not panic if you are not constantly on edge for the next submission or exam. If you come from an education system that was very strict and elimination based, a kind of horse race where pressure was everything and the proof of progress and success, you might feel at first like you are not being pushed hard enough.

The truth is that you have to go after what you want. Nobody will hand it to you, and that is not a flaw in the Finnish education system but rather an approach preparing you. What Lapland UAS does so well is that it transitions you gradually from being guided at every step toward becoming almost completely independent, the way you need to be in a real job. It lets go of your hand just enough so that by the time you graduate, you have the confidence to know you can do things on your own. And you can. You really can.

– Vincenzina, Data Engineer
Bachelor of Engineering in Machine Learning and Data Engineering, Alumna 2026 –