International students at Linnaeus University.

Have you had a dream of working on a cafe? learning how to make Cappuccino, caffè latte or simply just being at the friendly environment of cafe? Are you looking for a cafe to try yourself with all this? Have you heard about our nice, cozy café Tufvan in campus?

Here in campus we have a cafe which you can work there as volunteer. You just need to go to Cafe and write your name on time table, then you just need to show up at the time you booked and here it’s your first experience of working on a cafe. There are people who can help and teach you during your work, so there is no fear;) As I said it’s volunteering work so you won’t get any money BUT you are allowed to have free drink and a meal as long as you are working. There is also other opportunities of receiving discount coupons for one more meal or renting pool and etc.

You can run your performance or just be there as spectacular

I asked one one my friends to write about her experience here in Sweden and since she is always available in Tufvan, I asked her about her time and experience there too. Here is Chanat Preechawipat’s story.

A face, A story

This is based on a true story!

Once upon a time (which you’ve heard so many times), there was a helmet girl who loved Swedish music working in a Japanese factory in Thailand. Whenever she went out, the helmet girl brought a CD-ROM that she put all the music she liked with her.

One day, her supplier went bankrupt. She got mad from transferring the production from a former supplier to another supplier. The best way to heal her mind was music. The music could help her brain to get rid of noisy sound from the pressing machines after work. She realized that she was not the only one who had bad experiences as she could feel from the songs. During hard time, she found the real flowers from her colleagues and poor workers in supplier’s factory which lifted her mind and cheered her up until the end of the project. When she almost finished the project, she got a chance to consider the master programme in Sweden. She took that chance and moved on for a new experience in a new place that was totally different from what she used to.

The project of transferring production was ended while a new life had just begun in a small city called Växjö. She started the first course as a free mover in Business Process & Supply Chain Management programme in September, 2010. She met new friends which she started to speak with at a cafe that located in the middle of university campus, named Tufvan. Her first impression about the place was nothing as she was too nervous to talk to her classmates. From classmates became good friends. She met them more often at Tufvan. Without alcohols, the conversation could go on consciously.

Kids at Tufvan

One year later, things were stable. Many friends had left as they finished their one-year master programme. The helmet girl who took a two-year programme felt so lonely. She was afraid to get depressed during a long winter. She went to Tufvan again to be a worker there. As a voluntary worker, she enjoyed serving people, having fun with the dishwasher, and cleaning stuffs. She was so impressed how the dishwasher could finish cleaning in 3 minutes. She wished to have one for her family in Thailand. Her aim of working at Tufvan was avoiding from getting bored and depressed. However, when it was crowded, she really had no time to feel anything. The pressure could bring many mistakes like dropping dishes, serving kyckling baguette without kyckling! As she was not a coffee lover, she served latte and macchiato without any idea how to make them or how the taste should be. She felt sorry for some customers who got something irregular from her.

Yes! You can also play!

At Tufvan, it was a good opportunity to see people. The helmet girl could get to know more about the characteristics of Swedish and non-Swedish people from co-workers and the customers. She enjoyed the events like acoustic stage, poetry, and etc. She loved to make friends with people no matter what which age they were. The foods were nice and inexpensive compared to other places where students could get the internet access, have a meeting, and playing billiards with a short walk not far to their places and university. As being a normal worker supporting shift leaders became shift leader. The helmet girl got more priority for getting free coffees while she didn’t like to drink coffee and using a magic pen for noting down what had to be done. Like being normal workers, the helmet girl still could choose whenever she could be able to work.

The helmet girl was wondering how others were thinking about Café Tufvan…..as the customers, workers, and good friends.

Chanat Preechawipat

April 28, 2012

P.s Pictures from Chanat and Cafe Tufvan’s facebook page.

You already know about variety of nationalities in our campus.  One of the outcomes of this variety is knowing different celebrations in different countries. One of those was for Nowruz, Iranian new year*, and celebrated days before and after that. This year some of Iranian students arranged parties to introduce these festivals. We had an outdoor festival for Chaharshanbe Suri which was really great. I think everybody who joined to that party enjoyed it. After that it was Nowruz celebration. I just surprised when I saw how non-Iranian students interested in Persian dance and honesty some of them were dancing even better Iranian students, atleast I can say better than me:D And tomorrow there will be Sizdah Be-dar, if weather don’t become snowy or rainy again.

From all these parties and gatherings what I’ve got is knowing each other more and more. Not just knowing a person, knowing differences between countries and of course similarities. And also remembering our friends whenever we hear something related to her/his country in future. Here is one of my best gifts that I received because of living in campus with many good friends. My friend Anka, was in Germany during Iranian celebrations to do her internship. I received this message a day after one of parties and it’s a lot for me. Now I know I have one more friend in my friends circle who will remember me as her friend in future, no matter where we will. And all this is because of our lovely campus:)

Anka: “Asreen- How was the party? How are you? Yesterday a girl in my 3rd grade class told me, she is going to celebrate the persian new year and will jump over a fire, but her little cousin has to use a candle that was so nice – because I had to think about you: Looove the intercultural experiences in Växjö!!”

Chaharshanbe Suri party- Behind the Teleborg Castel, Växjö campuse 2012

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ns-oDCufVYU

P.S: Actually Nowruz is not just for Iranian nation. As you can see here other countries like Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Iraq, Turkey, Kosovo, Tajikistan, Albania and … also celebrate this day and accept it as one of their holidays. But since it’s mostly known as Iranian new year or Persian new year I also used this name for that here, otherwise there is no restriction to specify it just for Iraninas, at least from my point of view:)

Lets talk about computer science study in LNU and in some other universities.

First, you should be clear with yourself that in which field of computer science you want to spend your future life. Here in LNU computer science divided to majors which you can see in website. Here I will talk about these majors a:  Software technology in both bachelor and master degree, Network security in bachelor level, Social Media and web technology in master level, Information system in both bachelor and master degree. And I will ask some of friends in other majors to write about their program too.

Software technology

Now, we will talk about Software technology in bachelor level related courses. OK! Welcome to the programming, programming and programming.  If you are thinking about bachelor level, this program is pretty good for you which make you ready to learn about different languages and methods of programming. The program contains too many assignments which most of them should do in Java programming language. I should tell you something here about the assignments: Don’t panic! Mostly you will work in a group of your classmates, you have access to TA’s and teacher and if you could manage time, you have enough time to finish and submit them, but if by any chance you couldn’t submit in regular deadlines, don’t worry! Here is Sweden and you are at one of the most flexible academic life you have ever seen, means for almost every courses you still have second and third chance to submit your assignments but ofcourse you will receive some penalty in your final grade.

Now back to the program introducing:  You don’t have any background in Java? Don’t worry, here there is some basic courses for you which you have to take and pass in your first year of study else you will meet many problems in future courses because the main programming language of this university as I said is Java. You will also have some courses in the field of network security and programming, databases, software architect and many more which you can find at university website.

About the Master level of software technology program, Ok, again welcome to the programming and programming and oh my God! Again programming? Yes, it’s true. There are some courses which are not really programming base courses but you should be familiar at least with one programming language, and something else? What did you expect from software program? The language programming which is very popular in this university it’s still Java, so be sure you have a very good background at that, else even by passing basic courses to learn java, you will be in trouble by the assignments and deadline! It’s a big WARNING! for you because ye unfortunately there is no other programming language here. Ofcourse you can take some course on mobile programming and Android programming which is also popular for students. If you are interested in functional programming such as Haskell or Erlang, I strongly recommend you Goteborg university and Chalmers university in both master and bachelor level. They have enough courses to cover your knowledge and interest in this field and they also have opportunities like research position, PhD position and … for your future work. However software technology in LNU has good courses and really good teachers with wide knowledge but I think it’s not enough – as you can see here- for such a wide program which go bigger and bigger these years. As you can see at program page, they are limit but I can see that compare with 2 years ago, now we have some more courses and we hope for more and various courses:)

To be continued…

Stories behind the Picture

I’ve told you before about the project we had in briefly, now I want to explain more about that fantastic week. Students who study in program Social media and web technology has a course with the name of Cross media design and production. The aim of this course is how we can use different medias together(cross media) to present some idea. During the course and part of our assignments we had a workshop week which we needed to go to SVT and learn about different methods and technologies they use to present ideas. The first assignment of  week was a surprise! They asked us to divide to groups and gave us some photos, each photo for each group. Photos were without any information and we were not allowed to ask about related information for example time, location and etc. Then we should write a story which we thought that photo is telling and make a movie based on our story. We had equipments, we had access to almost everything to make our first short movie, but the problem was we didn’t have enough time. They gave us the picture at 4 p.m and the deadline was 10.a.m tomorrow! Funny ha? Specially when you want to make a good movie and It was always your dream!

Hopefully all of us met deadline and result was amazing. We shown are movies, talked and enjoyed our stories and listened to true story of the photos. But there were something out there waiting for us as a big big surprise. Afer that they told us now you should think about something bigger! To should run a live show from SVT’s studio and handle everything by yourselves! From writing scripts for presenters, selection presenters, managing everything, sound, camera, director, decoration and more and more! I think all of us at first was shocked! Because they wanted such a big activity from non-experienced students like us for less that 3days! And as live program which everyone could watch online!

We started to take different responsibilities and soon we started to have meetings, talks and working on our duties. Technical persons focused on equipments of control room, camera persons, editor staff, presenter, web crew and … everything was good specially with the advices of SVT crews and our teachers. But all of us had stress about live time. At the live day, we ran a rehearsal. Me as a director of live show could feel the pressure of stress on our shoulders. It was rehearsal but we wanted to make it as real and since it was our first time to run whole program exactly like the live, it had some problems.

I was worried about mistakes during live, and we didn’t have enough time until live. Everyone left for lunch before live and me and one of my crew stayed to fixe remain problems. 15 minutes before live was freaky. I started to warn my crew about time and ask them to stay in their positions. 1 minutes to live we started our broadcasting over the web and after that I counted down: 5-4-3-2-1 Camera two take! I could feel my heartbeat hundreds more that regular time.  First 10 minutes of live was without any stop and after that we had around 3 minutes to rest because we wanted to show our movies during live. When movie started to broadcasting I just heard that everyone congrats us because of our amazing job and how we could handle everything. After around 35 minutes we finished our live show with jump and happy faces. We did very good and big thing, specially because we didn’t have any experience at this field. Everyone was proud of us, our teachers and SVT people. And I’m also proud of ourselves.

If you are interested to watch our live show and our movies, you can watch the recorded version here.

This week is very busy for us who take Cross media and video production course. We made short movies and we will broadcast them in a live show on Friday. We have very interesting and busy workshop at SVT and we will use one of their studios for launching our live show. I’ll be back with more information, details and pictures of this amazing week. But now if you want to follow us and know more about the project you can get information from our facebook page “Stories behind the picture“ and watch the show and our movies live on our website, Friday at 2 p.m.

You can also contribute in our project by writing your stories about the pictures which are uploaded. Write your short stories that you think the picture is telling to you or is related to, then see at live show how it’s close to real story behind the picture and watch our story which will tell to you by movie.

If you want to know a country, try their local food. It’s one of my methods to know a place and also be satisfy! Last year, I had chance to travel to some countries. I tried many delicious food and drink, the local ones, the popular ones and so on. But this year seems there is no need to travel so far. Many nationalities is living in my neighbor. Let me count: Iranian, Japanese, Korean, Chines, Italian, American, German, Cameroonian, Vietnamese,Canadian and we always have open doors to some friends from other corridors so count Russian in our corridor too. Wow! it’s like a small world! So we can try other nationality’s food almost every time we want.

As a tradition of our corridor we arranged a night for international dinner. And I’m telling you, It was great! Can you imagine a table full of food from all above nationalities? How happy was that day our stomach!

I also have some good friends which not living in corridors, I wanted to have same experience with them with small and private one, feeling more friendly. I invited them to my corridor and made one of my best jobs! Just for record, it was the second time in my life that I cooked that Persian food. It’s not the really hard one, but I must be honest here that I’m not the one who spend time for cooking! It was a really good experience and good result since I was 15 and cooked that food for first time! I’m proud of myself:D

Now we will try to make it as a routine, we cook one meal from our country and eat it together. It’s not all about eating and cooking, it’s mostly about being more friend and know each other trough food!

Try this way if you haven’t try. You will see how it will be fun. A crazy busy day at kitchen, and very nice night with friends and of course a lot of food!

Are you interested in watching movies with your friends in environment like real cinema?

I‘m a cinema going person. I love to watch movies in cinema with my friends or even alone. I always can watch what I like in my room, but being in cinema’s atmosphere is delightful. Unfortunately we are poor, jobless students and must be careful about our pocket money. So it’s not really possible to go every week to cinema, maybe once or twice a month. But what about that pleasure feel? What about siting and watching movies in big screen?

Here I want to present you Cinema Campus. You can follow them on facebook, or their blog to know about this week’s movies. Usually they name a week as a specific genre, and screen 2 movies per week related to that. I think you can suggest them about the movies or week name. The very good thing for us as students is you will pay a very very small fee for whole semester to watch movie twice a week. Go and register for this semester and have fun and socialize with other students. Talk about movie after that, go for Fika and make new friends.

What will happen if you find that your laptop is broken? Terrible ha? Specially when laptops are our only way to be connected with family and friends in our country, and the only way to help you in boring hours. Now imagine yourself with broken one, without having guarantee. This is what happened to me 10 days a go during my deadlines!

I took my laptop to the store at campus to check if they can fix it or not? But the price was too much. I could add a bit more to that price to buy the new one! What could I do? I convinced myself: You are engineer, you fixed many desktops before, there is no big difference, you can do it. Don’t panic, DO IT! I was like a doctor who wants to run a heart surgery on her little child!

I knew what was the problem. I needed a new CPU cooler to fix it. But at first step I had to open it. I needed screw driver and God! no-one had. I asked from IT service of our department and they said sorry, we can’t give it to you even for hours because you are student and may not return it back! But there is always people there who can trust you. A very kind man at N building( that I don’t even know his name) gave the complete set of their screw drivers without knowing me, asking my name or receiving any credential from me as deposit of trust. He just told me I trust you so go and Do what you want. If by any chance, you from IT service at N building are reading here I really appreciate your trust and your sympathy at that day. Thank you:)

With a shaking heart, I started to open my laptop. I opened it during a long surgery but after that I looked to that separated parts and asked myself how can I assemble this again? I ran in to the computer stores in down town to find compatible fan. The way we usually do in my country if we want to fix computer by ourselves. We can buy it from stocks or order it and receive it almost in less than 1 hour of search! But here after searching for a day, nothing found! Sellers told me I can’t buy something like this from stores, the only ones who have such stuffs are those who make laptops and they won’t sell devices to free customers like me! Ah! I wish I was in my country that moments.

The only way was online ordering. The problem of online ordering is you can’t count on the arrival day. It may come in a week or in a month. I didn’t have any choice so I ordered one from ebay. My deadline passed and hopefully teacher gave me extra time to submit assignment. Thanks to my friend who borrowed her laptop to work on my assignment. Hopefully fan arrived less than one week and I started to continue surgery on my patient after I left that on floor for days in situation which you can see in picture. Guess what? I did it. I’m a big surgeon! During the dissemblance I made a mistake and it was close to miss my wireless card, but hopefully there wasn’t an irreversible damage! And now, here I am with my healthy laptop even better than before. Now I think I can fix any laptop of any brand:D

As many directors do after receiving their golden statute, I want to thank my corridor friends who helped me during first sad moments to find screw driver or using scissors instead of that! Or suggesting to go to gas station near campus and ask them for screw driver at 2 a.m just to help me to be calm down. And all those who helped me to pass that problem. What? don’t take microphone I want to say thank you more…

My poor laptop after dissemblance!

Today, the first one of our corridor-mates who was Erasmus student left us to her country. During coming days, 4 more students will leave us:( We will miss you guys.

Pancake’s floor friends good luck with your study and life:)

Seems everybody is coming back to student life and campus. During new year’s holiday, campus was like an empty town. But some of us was here to save our territory!

You know what’s the worse thing? Guess what? You have exam after holiday! Ah! Why god? Why? What would happen if it was before new year? The monster of exam is always with students, now think you are in vacation and you must be worry about your exams or final assignments or presentations or whatever! The really good thing of Chalmers university( I really try to don’t say the only good thing in my point of view!) is all exams and actually whole semester always finish week(s) before new year, and you almost have about one month free until new semester! Imagine what a paradise! One month totally free of exam’s stress, study pressure and…

OK! Lets short complaining;) Wish you happy new semester and luck in remained exams!