The first week

It is a week ago that I arrived in Windhoek, Namibia.

My mission is to work together with my Namibian colleagues to set up the first overseas campus of any Finnish university. University of Turku, where I am working as a professor of Computer Science, has agreed with University of Namibia (UNAM) to start an MSc (Tech) degree program at the premises of UNAM.

The first week has been an inspiring one, especially with numerous get-togethers at my home, which I intend to use as a place to meet and stay with each other and learn to know (from) each other. A bit like what I understand the Bauhaus movement was promoting way back.

The idea of the software engineering graduate program came, a few years back, from the current VC of UNAM, Prof Kenneth Matengu. I learned to know him when we both were living at Joensuu, a city in the Finnish Karelia that hosts a campus of the University of Eastern Finland.

While years have passed from that crucial evening with Kenneth, the program has taken a form of an activating degree program that aims at growing software engineers who can transform the realities of their future customers by inviting them to co-design processes. In a co-design process, a software engineer works with other professionals and users to create technologies that change the users’ lives.